Several organizations leverage Visio to document their environment. They use Visio to show network schematics, large application deployments, even documenting the hardware in racks. With Novell Operations Center 5.0 we have made it even easier to bring in Visio drawings and lighting them up with elements being managed to show health and availability.

In the flash video attached to this blog, I recorded an example of bringing in a visio drawing and then linking elements to different things on the computer racks. Below are the highlevel steps to do this yourself.

1) You must first save the visio drawing out of Visio as an SVG file.

2) Once saved, within the Operations Center java console, go to the view you wish to have the drawing on, go into edit mode and clear the drawing. This will remove the current drawing.

3) Next from the File menu, choose "Open" and select the SVG version of the visio drawing. This will bring in the drawing and show it in the layout view.

4) The next steps is to turn on the flatten tool, this is required in order to have the drag and drop highlight the different areas within the visio drawing and allow you to control where within the drawing you want the element linked.

After you are done with the dragging and dropping, you can then save the drawing and you are done. This visio drawing is then usable in the java console or the dashboard.

Video: visiolayoutexample.swf

Have fun!
- Tobin