status of VNE?

[E Huber]

I am a long time user of Visio Network Equipment (VNE) libraries of Visio shapes. This goes back to ~1976 when Visio (pre-Microsoft days) shipped out a physical CD every quarter to the subscribers. The last I heard from Microsoft about VNE was in late 2000 when I received a letter stating that I go upgrade to newer services and suggesting that the CDs were going to disappear and be replaced by web access on a pay-per-use basis. I chose not to go the web route, and my use of Visio went to zero.

Now, three years later I have to go back into Visio, and just upgraded to Visio Pro 2003. Fortunately the upgrade went without a hitch, but I am left wandering/wondering what about the huge investiment I have in VNE symbols. The stack of CDs and related stuff is about 3 inches high.

Specific questions: Have VNE shapes been dropped? Have VNE shapes been incorporated into Visio? Is there still a CD library subscription? Where does one go to get shapes? Or, again have VNE shapes just been rolled into the basic product itself?

The one answer I hope not to get is that users like myself should go to each vendor for their version of Visio shapes for the specific products/product lines of interest.

Thanks in advance,
E. W. Huber, Jr.

 

[al edlund]

vne is gone. there is a third party market available for shapes, but the underlying code
that gave us the functionality has been dropped. you can check at john marshall's site
for a list of stencil providers
www.mvps.org/visio