My company became a Visio business partner in 1998, so that was a couple of years before Microsoft acquired Visio for what was their largest purchase at the time. Microsoft wound down the annual Visio worldwide conferences that used to happen, and Visio partners became lost in the much larger multi-faceted Microsoft partner community. We lost the hub where Visio solution providers, or companies that used Visio within their own applications, or just business productivity users, could share ideas and cross-fertilize. I still have friends and connections from those pre-Microsoft days, and we also have a small number of Microsoft MVPs who specialise in Visio who keep up regular contact. What we missed is a central hub that anyone can access to find partners that have Visio skills, either for development or knowledge transfer, or can have applications that utilise Visio. So it is very welcome to see that Microsoft have now revamped their Visio partner portal to include featured partners and solutions. Please check out this web page and I think the partners are fortuitously listed alphabetically for me….
