Visio 2007 Add-in for Operations Manager 2007 R2 Released

The Visio 2007 Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 combines the strengths of two applications widely used in enterprise IT to simplify the creation of customized graphical dashboards showing the health of an environment. Examples of such diagrams include showing objects by geography overlaid on a map, by location in a datacenter or building, by role in a logical view of an application or by topology for complex distributed applications such as Exchange or Active Directory. 

Update (Nov. 9, 2011): The add-in is now available as an attachment to this post. The documentation is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee342533.aspx.

New features for this release include:

1. Links to the Web Console Health Explorer and Alerts view: to determine why the state of an object is in a particular state and see the alerts associated to this object.
   
2. Insert Shape: You can insert shapes using the icons stored in Operations Manager to keep the same look-and-feel of Visio diagrams as you would see in the Operations Manager console.
   

The Visio Add-in has the following features:

1. Distributed applications exported from System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 as Visio documents automatically show live health state information on the exported objects when opened in Visio.
2. You can easily create new Visio documents and link shapes to any managed object (computer, database, web site, perspective etc.) to show the current health state.
3. You can automatically link entire existing Visio documents to the computer and network devices managed by Operations Manager by matching computer names or IP addresses.
4. You can add shapes pulled from Operations Manager using the Insert Shape functionality.
5. Health states can be automatically refreshed in Visio documents. You can use this option along with Visio’s full screen view to create dashboard views suitable for use as a summary display in a datacenter control room.
6. You can use the predefined data graphics enable you to toggle from Operations Manager health icons to shape color for health state, or create your own new data graphic easily within Visio. 

To get your imagination going, here are some sample ideas for dashboards created in Visio and linked to Operations Manager using this add-in: