Microsoft Announces Public Beta Release of Visio 2003 More Drawing and Diagramming Power on the Way Eric Grevstad
Mon 5/26/03 -- Since March, Microsoft Office 2003 (whose formal release has slipped from "summer" to "second half of 2003") has available in a public beta release. Now Microsoft Corp. is doing the same for Office Visio 2003, the business drawing, diagramming, and flowcharting program scheduled to go on sale later this year. The new release is intended to turn Visio into an even stronger way to design, document, and analyze business processes.
The software's first upgrade in two years, Visio 2003 will be available in Standard and Professional editions (the latter, as before, adding extra drawing shapes and solutions for technical professionals to create developer, engineering, Web, and other diagrams), at prices to be announced. The beta offering, like its Office counterpart, will carry only a shipping and handling charge but expire after a finite test period.
New features in Visio 2003 range from new diagram galleries and templates -- including common types that support the Six Sigma, ISO 9000, and TQM quality control systems -- to new ways to collaborate and track comments, such as SVG export and publishing to a Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server workspace, and the ability to convert a Microsoft Outlook calendar to a Visio calendar.
Tablet PC support and the ability to rotate shapes without switching to a special rotation mode make creating and modifying diagrams easier, while XML and .NET Web service support turn Visio into an extensible platform for integrating with other business systems. New templates help capture and structure ideas from brainstorming sessions for export to Word, Excel, or XML.
