 |
|
|
An Interview with Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec
Interviewed by Geetesh Bajaj, August
31st 2004
Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec (pictured to the left) is a Lead
Program Manager with Visio at Microsoft. Mai-lan has been with
Microsoft for five years, working on Microsoft Commerce Server,
Microsoft Transaction Server, and Visio. Outside of Microsoft,
Mai-lan has been Director of E-commerce at digeo and one of the
first product managers at Qpass. She is the author of two technology
books for business managers and multiple articles in MSDN Magazine.
Mai-lan is currently working on the next version of Visio.
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
Tell us more about Visio and how Microsoft positions
the product.
Visio is all about communication of ideas and analysis of
information, whether it is complex or simple, business or
technical. As a diagramming program, Visio can be used to
create flowcharts for business processes or document IT networks.
Visio also has a rich automation model that lets our partners
create line-of-business applications that take advantage
of the drawing functionality to automatically create, display,
or modify diagrams to meet their business solution needs.
For example, Visio can be used as a manufacturing Bill-of-Materials
(BOMs) designer or a “digital dashboard” displaying
status of requests in an ecommerce customer service queue.
I’ve always found Visio to be a fascinating product
to work on because it can be used in so many different contexts.
|
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
How well does Visio complement the built-in diagram
capabilities in Microsoft Office applications like PowerPoint,
Word and Excel.
Visio has built-in support for integration with Microsoft
Exchange (automatically creating organization charts) and
Project (automatically generating timelines and calendars).
Visio lets users create simple and more complex diagrams
that drive business decisions, or are driven by external
data. Users can copy these diagrams into any other Office
document, such as Word document or a PowerPoint slide, to
display the drawing in context to other information. Visio
also has a number of other features that let diagrams be
used as an interface for other documents and processes. For
example, the hyper linking functionality for shapes is a
simple, yet effective way to use a business flowchart diagram
to navigate to a marketing presentation or an HR process
document.
|
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
Visio is an amazing program yet so complex for typical PowerPoint users
- how can PowerPoint users derive maximum benefits from using both
programs together?
Visio’s core competency is to make it easy to create
and modify diagrams. You can use Visio’s rich set of
tools to create the diagram and then cut-and-paste the finished
diagram into PowerPoint to display the drawing in the context
of your communication.
|
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
What type of user responses do you receive from people
who use both Visio and PowerPoint and what do you do with
these responses?
PowerPoint users who employ Visio diagrams in presentations
typically want a rich, graphical diagram. The diagram itself
must be visually compelling to blend in with the overall
PowerPoint presentation. We’ve taken that feedback and
are working hard to improve the visual appearance of a diagram
in the next release.
|
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
Visio 2003 removed the AI/EPS export option that was always a part of
Visio. What prompted that?
It was primarily driven by our move in Visio 2003 towards
Unicode support for better international support. In our
tradeoff between support for the AI/EPS converters and international
support, we opted to better support our growing international
customer base.6
|
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
What is the best way to use my existing Visio drawings
in tools like Adobe Photoshop, CorelDRAW, Quark Xpress
and Macromedia Flash?
You can use any of Visio output formats, such as PNG or
JPG. I’d recommend JPG since Visio gives you the ability
to control more output parameters.
|
Geetesh:
Mai-lan:
|
Tell us more about some non-conventional uses of Visio.
I’ve seen Visio used as a custom business process designer,
a manufacturing shop floor simulation tool, a sales process
automation tool, and in other widely varying contexts.
One of my favorite uses of Visio is in England, where Visio
is used in a touch-screen application for bed assignments
in a hospital. Nurses and hospital administrators can view
and modify bed assignments in wards visually, which makes
it easy to maintain maximum capacity. Another one of our
partners has a great risk analysis and accident reporting
tool that is being used by Dutch Shell. By using Visio process
diagrams to map out potential risks and to review mistakes
made in oil rigging accidents, the third party application
was able to contribute to the significant reduction in accidents
on site.
There are many other interesting examples for Visio usage
in the workplace – regardless of industry, a visual
representation of information often is the easiest way to
convey simple or complex concepts.
|
|
|
