Altima Technologies, a veteran of the network-diagramming battlefield (the company's founders developed SysDraw, now assimilated into Visio), has wisely chosen not to build yet another drawing engine. Instead, Altima has concentrated on building shapes that work with just about any program with drawing capabilities, from Microsoft PowerPoint and FrontPage to Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk AutoCAD and even the ubiquitous Visio. As a result, salespeople writing proposals in Microsoft Word and speakers building PowerPoint presentations can use the tools they already know and still get accurate, detailed images of real network equipment.

Altima's NetZoom 2000 is, in many ways, the tool that Visio Network Equipment should be. Rather than making us hunt through multiple stencils, NetZoom displayed shapes by product category, equipment type, manufacturer and product line. We also could search the shape database by product number or by description--for example, 100Base-T. Once we selected a chassis device, we simply clicked on the related tab to see the set of modules that can be plugged into the chassis.

As if offering more than 35,000 network device shapes weren't enough, every NetZoom package includes a one-year subscription for new and updated shapes. Further, if your favorite widget isn't included, just run the included shape-download application and select the vendor whose shapes you'd like to update. Even with a slow Internet connection, the download was snappy. Altima's close relationships with equipment vendors such as 3Com Corp. and ZyXel Communications Corp. and its promise to develop new shapes requested by customers or vendor partners within two to three weeks mean you shouldn't have any trouble getting the right shapes for your network.

Although the variety of shapes and the ease of finding and updating them make NetZoom worth its meager $299 asking price, we found added value: NetZoom 2000's shapes include several features that put them significantly ahead of the pack. To start, almost every device in the database has front, back and overhead views.

One thing that has always annoyed us about most shapes is the lack of connection points. A 12-port hub, in most diagramming products, has three or four connection points. In NetZoom, however, all shapes have port-accurate connection points, meaning there's a connection point for very port. We could even verify connections to make sure we didn't connect an RJ-45 port to the power connector. One quibble: We connected a 100Base-T port to an ISDN RJ-45 port, but NetZoom told us we'd connected two RJ-45 ports--it checked the connector but not the protocol. Finally, once we'd built a diagram, we could export all the shape properties, including data such as power consumption and heat dissipation, to a .csv file for a bill of materials or requirements document.

NetZoom 2000 for Visio 3.2 and NetZoom 2000 for PowerPoint/Office 2000 3.2, $299 for downloadable version, $309 for CD (price includes one-year subscription to new and updated shapes). Available: Now. Altima Technologies, (630) 790-0500; fax (630) 790-9995. www.altimatech.com or sales@altimatech.com