Sharepoint and Visio together

Question

The company I work for is looking for a way to display our Visio diagrams to our FE's through their browsers on PC, tablets, etc.

Currently they do this by exporting diagrams to HTML and they are heavy on the coding side and it seems not all browsers are handing it well. So we have been thinking about SharePoint. I've read that Viso and SharePoint are a logical pairing in doing what we are trying to do. So my questions are...

1. Does SharePoint and Visio work smoothly together?
2. Is there a major learning curve for Visio users to get their work on SharePoint?
3. Will we be able to create a good website front-end for our Visio diagrams?
4. Search capabilities, how good are they? We'd have to be able to search for the diagrams.
5. Will the diagrams once on SharePoint work in all browsers, tablets, etc?
6. If we implement this, is it best to do SharePoint 2013 with Visio 2013 to cause less problems with things?
7. If both are not 2013... is that an issue?
8. We are looking to do this on AWS (Amazon Web Services), thoughts?
9. Can anyone tell me of any issues we might run into?

This is a big thing for the company I'm working for and I'm trying to present them with a good solution when it comes to Visio diagram sharing etc. SharePoint seemed to be a good option.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

1. Yes, SharePoint 2013 has Visio Services which allow SharePoint to display visio diagrams effortlessly (on desktop AND mobile) - SharePoint 2010 not so much without heavy custom coding

2. Not at all. A visio diagram can be saved normally, just the save location needs to change (to a library in SharePoint)

3. Definitely. Since visios can appear directly in the browser, you can display them however you like.

4. Visio documents are still documents - search will display them without issue. You can enhance the end result display as well.

5. Using Visio Services, yes.

6. Yes it is best, but not necessary. Publishing directly to sharepoint requires 2013 I believe (could be wrong here)

7. It will be. You will need to customize extensively to do what you want without end user adoption issues.

8. I have no experience with AWS sorry. I would think you would go with Office 365 or something though, if that is an option.

9. Not many if you have SP2013 with Visio Services enabled and are working with Visio 2013 (professional or premium edition). If you have this, then the end user 'front-end' is all you will need to really worry about. How it is displayed and interacted with by the end user will all need to be determined.