Some questions about the Cisco stencils for Visio

[Joel Page]

(I've cross posted this to the OmniGraffle Extras forum as well, just  
as an FYI)

As we work more at bettering our Visio support, one singular fact has  
presented itself: Lots of people really really need to make use of the  
rather large library of Cisco stencils that are already available for  
Visio.

One of the problems that presents itself here in regard to that is  
that the large majority of those stencils are making use of the  
Enhanced MetaFile format (EMF), which OmniGraffle Professional  
currently does not parse. We are currently discussing talking to the  
folks who wrote the Visio binary file format parser for us to tackle  
this issue, in the meantime I am considering undertaking the task of  
creating these Cisco stencils for OmniGraffle (more or less from  
scratch), however I do have some questions...

I have seen a number of existing Cisco stencils for OmniGraffle that  
are fairly abstract, as shown here:

<http://people.omnigroup.com/jpage/stuff/Cisco-basic.png>

I also notice that the actual Cisco stencils in Visio are far more  
complex and detailed such as:

<http://people.omnigroup.com/jpage/stuff/Access_Server-AS5400.png>

So, the question is: Which of these styles are needed by the Graffle  
community most?

My guess is that it's the latter, but before I start working on my  
gameplan here I need to know what direction I'm heading in.

Please let me know here or over in the forum thread, and thanks!


Joel Page
Product Manager, OmniGraffle
The Omni Group