Visio 2000 - "the industry's first enterprise drawing engine/platform" launched a week ago - aims to enable organisations to create, store, exchange and edit drawings and diagrams using one file type.
Just as Microsoft owns the wordprocessing document format with Word (.doc) and spreadsheet files with Excel (.xls), Visiowants to set the standard for diagrams (.vsd).
The Seattle-based company is already some way towards achieving that aim - on target for $US250 million in sales this year for its $500-$2000 package and claiming over 90 per cent share of the "business drawing and diagram market" in the United States. The graphic engine has sold to about three million users worldwide for a range of business drawings including flowcharts, organisation charts, schematics, floor plans, software modelling and IT network diagrams.
"Visio gives the tools to put ideas on paper," says Visio Asia Pacific regional director Angus Robertson, frustrated like so many by being unable to draw anything but a stick man.
He also has the statistics to promote visual-based communications: we remember 20 per cent of what we hear, but 50 per cent of what we see and hear; adding visuals increases recall by 43 per cent; and technicians make three times as many errors when using narrative instructions compared to using a flowchart.
It's a message that's finding agreement in many New Zealand corporates including, Clear, Telecom, Telstra and EDS which all use Visio's predefined smart shapes to produce a variety of diagrammatic communications. Some like Clear are using Visio linked directly to an asset database to create network diagrams - in this case to communicate the Y2K compliance status of various components on its network. The diagrams provide a graphical representation of network components and associated applications, including Novell servers, Oracle databases, Windows NT operating systems, desktops and generators.
The more advanced Visio Professional version allows Clear's Y2K team to create layered network diagrams which can be drilled into for specific device configuration details.
