His technology articles have been published by CNET TechRepublic, Government Computer News, Federal Computer Week,, and others.Microsoft announced its plans to launch a new lightweight version of its Visio diagramming tool for Microsoft 365 back in June this year. He has worked with commercial, federal, higher education, and publishing clients to develop technical and thought leadership content. Will Kelly is a technical writer and analyst based in the Washington, DC area.
The subscription model, flexibility, not to mention the collaboration and authoring options are sheer genius for Visio Pro for Office 365 because they knock out each of the pain points that has consistently held Visio adoption back in the enterprise. To date, I’ve yet to come across a Microsoft IRM implementation in the wild but like the potential of the technology for protecting sensitive corporate data. You can also secure Visio diagrams with Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM) which can secure Visio files sent as file attachments and diagrams stored in the cloud. Both the document creator and reviewer can make diagram changes in real-time electronically because of the 5-seat licensing and the technology that can make this happen.
A business analyst or a technical writer can manage technical reviews electronically doing away with having to generate an Adobe Portable Document File (PDF) of a diagram or printing a hard copy to get review comments. I like co-authoring in Visio as a better way to run a technical review over diagrams. Visio for Office 365 includes co-authoring support which enables multiple users to collaborate on the same diagram without fear of breaking version control. Collaboration and authoring options for more users When the time comes that I need Visio for a project, the subscription model is going to be too hard for me to pass up. Collaboration was a No Go because the one Visio license was spread across multiple teams in some cases. I saw the lack of flexible Visio licensing cause people to hesitate in using Visio diagrams. In my experience, restrictive desktop licensing one of the things that held back Visio. Visio Pro for Office 365 includes the same features as Visio Professional 2016. You also get the latest Visio feature and security updates for the duration of the subscription.
The new Visio subscription model allows each user to install Visio on up to five PCs running Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7. Microsoft still sells Visio St andard 2016 and Visio Professional 2016 with standard desktop licensing.Visio Pro for Office 365 is $13.00 per month with an annual commitment or $15.50 for a monthly commitment. Here’s why: Joys of Microsoft Visio subscription licensing Making Visio Pro for Office 365 subscription-based is sheer genius in my opinion. Over the preceding years, I saw Visio become pretty much a niche application even after it got officially pulled under the Microsoft Office umbrella. In fact, my history with Visio goes back so far, I remember it before Microsoft acquired it.
I’ve been a big Microsoft Visio user over various contracts as a technical writer.