Here’s a tool to help you design your IT infrastructure, document it, and keep it ready for all future updates. The latest version of Visio Enterprise Edition has a lot of functionality ranging from network design and documentation, database design and modeling, software application modeling, and business process management. Because there are so many different features, it takes some time to learn. You can get started with the basic functionality without much trouble as it’s GUI-based with wizards and sample designs to guide you through. The accompanying manual walks you through the various components of Visio and explains how to work with them. You need a reasonably powerful machine to work with Visio as it has to process so much data. We installed it on a Celeron/366 NT server with 64 MB RAM and it was a little slow.

Visio 2000 comes in two CDs. The first of course contains Visio itself, while the second one contains the standard drawings used by various companies for their products. This has to be installed separately.

The best thing about the package is that it can automatically discover your network structure. It has an AutoDiscovery wizard for doing this, which takes you through a number of steps and comes out with a simple diagram for your network. So you can discover your network devices through SNMP, or even a simple ping. Another neat feature is that if you set it to rediscover, it’ll only add the new devices it finds. This way, it doesn’t end up spending time rediscovering devices from scratch. Some of the devices it finds include printers, servers, hubs, switches, and routers. Unfortunately, we didn’t find a separate option for PCs. It took them under the ‘others’ option. In the reports, however, workstations were specified. Once the auto-discovery is complete, you can generate reports to analyze them in a number of ways. For example, you can view them by manufacturer, class, or simply an overall summary of how many devices are there on your network.

Visio also let’s you also create data flow diagrams and UML diagrams for your software development lifecycles. In case you’re setting up a Website, then Visio can be used for conceptualizing how it looks. Or if you’re not satisfied with the structure of your current Website, you can also generate its maps or troubleshoot errors and missing hyperlinks.

Visio let’s you automatically import the sitemap for your Website. By default, it selects the maximum number of levels to search as six and sets the maximum number of links to discover as 500. You can also choose the kind of pages to look for, such as HTML, ASP, image files, etc. You have to be careful in choosing these settings, because if your Website is really big, the site map will take a long time to generate. Plus, the final view in Visio will be cumbersome to work with. That’s why it’s better to break up your site map into multiple parts. Finally, after you have the site map, you can save it as a HTML page. This page will retain all the links, so the moment you click on any of the pages displayed in the site map, it’ll take you there. This can be useful for improving your Website, and you can even put the site map itself on to your Website.

Visio can also be used for project management. It let’s you create PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and Gantt charts to keep track of your project progress and their deadlines. The software also let’s you create geographical maps and simple directional maps with roads and railroad tracks, etc. Interestingly, the geographical maps section didn’t have any maps for Asian countries. You can also layout floor plans for your office building. These are extremely easy to create, as you just have to drag-n-drop shapes such as walls, rooms, tables, chairs, and even computers.

Another major plus of the package is that it let’s you import any LDAP compliant directory structure, like NetWare’s NDS or Windows 2000’s Active Directory. You can also build a directory structure from scratch. It provides all the basic templates and shapes like users, workgroups, domains, etc, for doing this.

Visio has an extensive set of templates and shapes for creating so many different types of diagrams. You can also create your own shapes and add them to these sets. Another important feature in Visio is that it let’s you work with databases. In this, you can build a database structure from scratch with all the entity-relationship diagrams, or even import structures from ODBC compliant ones and work on their structures.

There’s a lot more you can do with Visio, such as create process flowcharts, block diagrams, organizational charts, etc. For the price, it’s a great buy, and can really help an organization in keeping track of its IT infrastructure.

Anil Chopra at PCQ Labs