Visio 2010 Add-Ins – Pay Attention System Center People!

You may have wondered how to crate pretty pictures to share on a big screen that depict some health information about stuff that you manage using System Center.  Here’s how …

I was mucking around with the Visio plug-ins for Operations Manager for the first time today, adding monitored objects from SCE 2010 (plus their health status) into Visio.  The cool thing with this is that it refreshes the objects’ health in Visio!  And then you can save your diagram into SharePoint 2010 with live health refreshing.  In other words, you can create nice and friendly views of the services that IT provides and share them with service owners and/or users via diagrams on SharePoint sites.

But it doesn’t stop there.

There are a lot of these plug-ins.  Why I’ve not heard/paid attention to most of these before, I have no idea.  There’s one for Exchange, allowing you a friendly view of your Exchange Server 2007 environment.  There is a cool one that drags in alerts from OpsMgr and update status from ConfigMgr if you are running a dynamic datacenter. 

Seriously, take a look at this stuff if you are running System Center, or if you’re a systems integrator looking for cool new upsell services.