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In the interesting discussion of the network
architecture diagram, I noticed this piece:
"The other 7 points from Andrew are pretty good,
though I'll never understand his attachment to Visio.
Any flowcharting tool will do; I used MacFlow last
time I did something like this."
Folks, I heartily disagree with Andrew about many of
the Microsoft products (Windows, Office, etc.).
However, one of the most meaningful "innovations" of
the company was the purchase of Visio--and their
intelligence in keeping the development team pretty
much intact.
The newer versions of Visio can do network and
database diagramming--"point" the tool to the network
and get a readout of all the IP addresses and a fair
amount about each switch, router, server, and client
on the network to the depth you instruct it to go
(although of course you'll have to do something about
the DHCP clients in the cleanup phase!).
Similarly, you can "point" Visio to the most popular
database products and get database schema diagrams to
the point that with their Enterprise tool you can even
generate code for another database into which you wish
to migrate the first--say from SQL Server to Oracle,
say.
>From what I have seen thus far, this just blows away
all the other products out there for diagramming,
illustrating, flowcharting, etc. The MacFlows of the
world don't even come close for this purpose.
(Fortunately, I understand there's an open-source
alternative coming soon!).
I hope this helps!
David
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