Visio Services

Visio Services is a new set of services added to SharePoint 2010 that let you:

1) View diagrams in the browser without needing Visio on your machine
2) Refresh data-driven diagrams in the browser
3) Integrate diagrams into SharePoint applications

What makes it so compelling is that the diagrams can represent data, but not simply static data, rather data that is constantly being updated. That means that a diagram can be displayed in the browser while representing a real entity such as a network or process and see changes updated in real time. Thus we have much richer way to display data than spreadsheets and charts without the long development times of a Silverlight or other rich visualization tool. The diagram can be created once in Visio using a data source such as a SQL Server table, get published to SharePoint, and begin immediately reflecting changes as the underlying data source changes.

Some of the key features are:

1) Browser-agnostic (yes, it even supports IE)
2) Full-fidelity Visio diagrams if your system supports Silverlight
3) Without Silverlight support, you get a PNG image of the diagram, but it still has the same data update capability
4) Supported data sources include: SQL Server, Excel, SharePoint lists, OLEDB, ODBC, and Custom sources such as flat files and XML
5) Can embed Visio Services web parts directly into web part pages
6) Visio services can be tuned to your specific hardware characteristics
7) Requires Visio 2010 to create the drawings

One good place to learn more about Visio Services is the Microsoft Visio Team Blog: Introducing Visio Services