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Altima Technologies, Inc.
Lisle Executive Center
3030 Warrenville Road, Suite 300
Lisle, IL. 60532, USA
Phone: 630.281.6464 (US Central Time)
Fax: 630.281.6460
www.AltimaTech.com |
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| News and Reviews |
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| Visio Net Center Shows Service Challenge |
| By Paul DeGroot |
| Reprinted
with permissions from Directions on Microsoft. For more information, visit
www.DirectionsOnMicrosoft.com
or call 425.739.4669. |
| Visio Enterprise Network Tools (VENT), a US$500 add-in to
Visio Professional 2002, has been discontinued. However, some features will
be included in future Visio and network management products, and VENT's
associated Visio Network Center Web site will remain live. The cancellation
raises some doubts about market acceptance of fee-based Web services associated
with Microsoft’s business productivity applications, an approach that Microsoft
might be considering for future versions of Office. |
| Lack of Customer Interest |
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Conceived as a low-cost network discovery and diagramming
tool, VENT included network equipment shapes for physical network diagrams
(which show port-by-port wiring of networks); templates for large networks,
such as campuses, enterprises, and rackmount systems; an autodiscovery
template that could automatically detect and diagram certain network devices;
and a one-year subscription to the Visio Network Center (VNC), a Web site
from which customers could download new equipment shapes and network-related
Visio templates.
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VENT was cancelled on July 1, 2002, due to “lack of customer interest,”
according to Microsoft. The company might also have underestimated the
difficulty of keeping its library of network device shapes up to date.
Microsoft took upon itself the task of creating the actual shapes and
wanted manufacturers to help out by sending in photos and diagrams of
new equipment. This strategy appears to have worked imperfectly, with
some customers complaining that the Web site was slow to post shapes for
new gear (although it is not clear whether Microsoft or the vendors were
to blame for the bottleneck).
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The VNC, which has a library of shapes for about 20,000 network devices,
will remain live for customers who purchased VENT before July 1, 2002.
They will be allowed to continue to access existing shapes on the site
at no additional charge.
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Microsoft has not indicated whether any additional shapes will still
be added to the library and recommends that customers ask their network
equipment vendors whether the vendor supplies Visio shapes for devices.
Customers can also
look at a service from Altima Technologies, which offers access to more
than 45,000 Visio shapes related to network devices at www.visiostencils.com.
Subscriptions to this service are advertised at US$299, significantly
less than the US$500 that Microsoft charged for VENT.
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According to Microsoft, some VENT features will be included in future
versions of Windows and others will be part of “a new network management
product” that has not been announced yet.
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| In the meantime, Microsoft has not given up on supplementing its packaged
software with Web-related offerings. A consumer offering, Money 2003, will
include promotions for financial services offered over the Web by Microsoft
partners, for example. (See “Money 2003 Offers Web-Based Services” on page
XX.) |
| Resources |
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For more about Microsoft’s future network management plans,
see "Management Roadmap Revealed" on page 3 of the June 2002
Update. For more information about Visio 2002, see “Visio 2002:
Out of Office” on page 24 of the Aug. 2001 Update.
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