Business Intelligence (BI) with Visio Services in SharePoint 2010

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This is the fourth article of a series to review the following five BI vehicles in SharePoint 2010:

A picture is worth a thousand words. This cannot be more applicable to what Visio Services can deliver. A feature of SharePoint 2010, Visio Services enables data-bound Visio drawings to be viewed in a web browser. This feature is for sharing Visio drawings and letting authorized users view Visio diagrams in a SharePoint library without having Visio or the Visio Viewer installed on their local computers. Visio Services can also refresh data and recalculate the visuals of a data-connected Visio drawing hosted on a SharePoint 2010 site. So a user will always see the latest and up to date information in a visual form. For instance, a complex manufacturing supply chain can be presented with clarity and simplicity, and up to date status with Visio Services as shown below. A Visio Services overview is a good starting point to better understand this feature. And the installation and administration of Visio Services are very easy to follow.

Visio Services can display Visio drawings using a Web Part without having a locally installed Microsoft Visio 2010 on the client computer. However Visio Services is not for creating or editing Visio diagrams. To create, edit, and publish diagrams to Visio Services, an author must have a locally installed Microsoft Visio Professional 2010 or Microsoft Visio Premium 2010.

Licensing

Available only with SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL), Visio Services must be deployed, provisioned, and enabled before first use. In addition, one must have Microsoft Visio Professional 2010 or Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 in order to save diagrams to SharePoint as Web drawings.

Access Control

To view a Visio drawing based on a SharePoint list or an Excel workbook connected to an Excel Services, a user must be authenticated and authorized by the SharePoint 2010 hosting the content. And three authentication methods are supported:

  • Integrated Windows
  • The viewer’s identity is used for authentication.
  • As needed, use constrained delegation to further restrict the connection to a target SQL Server database
  • Secured Store Service
  • Service account

External Data

While developing enterprise service architecture, planning for services that access external data sources is something not to overlook. For a service application as one the following using a delegated Windows identity to access an external source, the external data source must reside within the same domain with the SharePoint 2010 farm where the service application is located or the service application must be configured to use the Secure Store Service.

Namely Delegation of a Windows identity, Windows domain, and Secure Store Service are a few things to keep in mind if a service application to access a data store beyond the SharePoint farm where the service application is running. In other words, do the right thing to plan your Visio Services deployment.

(A cross-posting from Microsoft SharePoint Experts Blog)