Visio Add-in for SCOM R2

One of the features that I was excited about and still kind of am was the Visio add-in for OpsMgr R2. It basically connects Visio 2007 to OpsMgr so that your exported Visio diagram of you your distributed application is an live document that will show health state. My hopes for the product was to give the application groups views into their applications without having to give them the console BUT this is not the case.

They will get this:

since the stated requirements are:

• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (Release Candidate) Operations console
  Visio 2007 Professional SP1
• 
  Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, available from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=131605.
• 
  Visual Studio Tools for Office system Runtime 3.0, available from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=149729
• 
  2007 Microsoft Office System Update: Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies, available from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72637. (Note that this is already installed if you installed Visio 2007 after some version of .Net was already installed. If Visio was installed prior to installing .Net, re-run the Visio setup to add the .NET Programmability component or install the above mentioned package.)
  

So this is a bit disappointing and does not meet my needs of giving our application groups views without the console. Looks like I will have to go to Savision afterall.

But here are a few good links

Edgenet video demonstrating the capabilities
MS Blog plus the download


There is another Visio add-in for Operations manager floating around out there called "System Center Operations Manager & System Center Configuration Manager Add-In" - DO NOT GET THIS ONE. It's a template that connects to Operations Manager so you have to create your views manually and won't accept your exported views. Not to mention it has an option of downloading all the objects in OpsMgr and create a template of it which will use all your resources. I won't even link to it.