About importing Microsoft® Visio® diagrams

NOTE  The functionality described in this topic is available as an extension to Process Designer. See the ReadMe file (readme_fcmv4010.htm) provided with the IBM FileNet Connector for Microsoft Visio package for instructions for enabling this functionality in Process Designer and installing the Visio BPMN template and stencil to work with your Visio application.

You can use Microsoft Visio to create diagrams of business processes, and then import these Visio documents into Process Designer as a starting point for creating workflow processes. For Business Analysts familiar with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), a Visio stencil of BPMN shapes is provided with each shape mapped to a corresponding Process Designer object—a step, route, text annotation, data object, Workflow Group, submap, and so on. Shapes in other stencils are also mapped to Process Designer objects, and you can customize the mapping for shapes on existing Visio diagrams. See Mapping Visio shapes to Process Designer objects for details of the default mappings.

Preparing Visio diagrams for import

To prepare an existing Visio diagram for import into Process Designer, use Visio to save the diagram in Visio XML format (.VDX).

Process Designer can import Visio diagrams with one or more pages. During the import process, you can choose which pages to import. See Import Visio files in the online Help for Process Designer.

If you are using existing Visio diagrams that contain standard Visio shapes, many of the shapes are mapped to Process Designer objects in the default mapping file. If the default mapping is not appropriate for your application, you can change the mapping for each shape during the import process, and you can save your custom mapping for future use.

For best import results...

See the following examples of importing Visio diagrams: