For the artistically challenged, Visio is a gift from on high, with goodies such as connectors that reroute themselves when equipment is rearranged, drag-and-drop shapes for network equipment and an intuitive interface.
Over the past few years Visio Corp., and later Microsoft, has added network-specific extensions to its very accessible general-purpose diagramming engine. Growing from the small set of generic network object shapes in early versions of Visio, network-specific features now include autodiscovery and layout; import and diagramming tools for Active Directory, NDS and other LDAP-capable directories; database modeling shapes; and the Visio Network Equipment (VNE) portfolio, containing more than 20,000 shapes.
With the release of Visio 2002, the product line has been simplified. Four versions of Visio, from Standard through Enterprise, have been replaced with Standard and Professional versions and the Enterprise Network Tools option, which includes the autodiscovery and layout tool and Visio network equipment.
The good news is that Visio 2002 has retained all of Visio's historic strengths while improving features like Web site documentation, and Microsoft is offering new network device shapes over the Internet rather than making us wait for the "quarterly" update CD. Visio's other major strength is the range of shapes, both from Microsoft and from third parties.
As a general-purpose drawing tool, Visio didn't really stand out in any of our tests. It was simple to create the proposal diagrams, and VNE includes plenty of good-looking shapes, but Visio's limited reporting didn't give us an easy way to generate a bill of materials. Network device shapes are just pictures, and the connectors are just lines, so we had to work a little harder to include information about ports, link types and speeds -- items that netViz's and Netformx's products prompted us for when we created links.
Visio's autodiscovery and layout tool also has some limitations. Unlike Network Inspector, Visio didn't identify the ports to which devices were connected, and it couldn't give us good, detailed information about device configurations, as Network Designer did. Creating diagrams with Visio autodiscovery is also more work than with the other autodiscovery tools because you have to add each device and network to the diagram, where Network Designer will create a set of diagrams in a hierarchy by subnet automatically. Visio's autodiscovery tool does improve on earlier versions' reporting so you can generate reports on discovered networks.
Visio Professional 2002 with Visio Enterprise Network Tools, $499 plus $500 for tools. Available: Now. Microsoft Corp., (800) 24-VISIO, (425) 882-8080. www.microsoft.com/office/visio
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