Book Image

Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation - Second Edition

By : David Parker
Book Image

Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation - Second Edition

By: David Parker

Overview of this book

Microsoft Visio is a diagramming program which ultimately allows business professionals to explore and communicate complex information more effectively. Through easy-to-understand visual representations, Visio enables you to present complicated data in a clear and communicative way. Therefore, productivity is increased by utilizing the wide variety of diagrams that can convey information at a glance as data can be understood and acted upon quickly. This book enables business developers to unleash the full potential of Visio 2013 Professional Edition. Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation is a focused tutorial with a range of practical examples and downloadable code that shows you how to create business process diagramming templates with Visio, enabling you to effectively visualize business information. It draws on real business examples and needs and covers all the new features of Visio 2013 Professional Edition. This focused tutorial will enable you to get to grips with diagram validation in Visio 2013 Professional Edition to the fullest extent, enabling you to perform powerful automatic diagram verification based on custom logic and assuring correct and compliant diagrams. You will learn how to create and publish rules and how to use the ShapeSheet to write formulae. There is also a special focus on extending and enhancing the capabilities of Visio 2013 diagram validation and on features that are not found in the out-of-the-box product, like installing and using the new Rules Tools add-on complete with source code, reviewing the new diagramming rules in flowcharts and BPMN templates, and creating your own enhanced Data Flow Model Diagram template complete with validation rules. Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation begins by covering the basic functions of Visio 2013 before moving on to discuss how to formulate your own validation rules and how to use the Visio Object Model. ShapeSheet functions are explored in detail as well as how to create validation rule sets and visualizing issues, with practical demonstrations along the way. It also covers integration with SharePoint 2013 and Office365 and how to build a Rules Tools add-on using C#, how to create test and filter expressions, and how to publish validation rules for others to use. Finally, the book concludes with the creation and implementation of a new RuleSet for Data Flow Model Diagrams with a worked example. By following the practical and immediately deployable examples found in this book, you will successfully learn how to use the features of Microsoft Visio 2013 and how to extend the functionality provided in the box.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
10
10. A Worked Example for Data Flow Model Diagrams – Part 2
13
Index

It has been three years since the first edition of this book, and the power of Visio as a platform for visual data has been enhanced even more. Microsoft has merged the Premium edition with the far more popular Professional edition, which means that the content of this book is now accessible to literally millions more Visio users because the Professional edition is the norm in business.

Once the creators of Aldus PageMaker had successfully introduced the desktop publishing paradigm in the late eighties, some of the key personnel involved left because they decided that they could make a smarter diagramming application. Eighteen months later, they emerged with the Visio product. Now they needed to get a foothold in the market, so they targeted the leading process flow diagramming package of the day, ABC Flowcharter, as the one to outdo. They soon achieved their aim to become the number one flowcharting application, and so they went after other usage scenarios, such as network diagramming, organization charts, and building plans.

In 1999, Microsoft bought Visio Corporation and Visio gradually became Microsoft Office Visio, meaning that all add-ons had to be written in a certain manner and common Microsoft Office core libraries such as Fluent UI were ever more increasingly employed. Microsoft then dropped the Office part of the name, may be because Visio continues to be an independent profit center within Visio. The 2013 edition has seen Visio adopt the Open Packaging Convention that which had already been used by the main Office products for two versions. This potentially opens the contents of a Visio file to a mature group of developers with skills in this area.

Flowcharting still accounts for 30 percent of the typical uses that Visio is put to, but the core product did not substantially enhance its flowcharting abilities. There were some add-ons that provided rules, perhaps most notably for Data Flow Diagrams, UML, and Database Modelling (all of which have now lost their built-in rules engine), and many third parties have built whole flowcharting applications based on Visio. What all of these enhancements have in common is the imposition of a structure to the diagrams, which necessarily means the adoption of one ruleset or another. There are a lot of competing and complementary rulesets in use, but what is important is that the chosen ruleset fits the purpose it is being used for and that it can be understood by other related professionals.

It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the particular thousand words understood by each individual are more likely to be the same if the picture was created with commonly available rules. The structured diagramming features and Validation API in Visio Professional 2013 enable business diagramming rules to be developed, reviewed, and deployed. The first diagramming types to have these rules applied to them are process flowcharts, reminiscent of the vertical markets attacked by the first versions of Visio itself, but these rules can and will be extended beyond this discipline.