[GLLUG] Visio Replacement

[Mike Reed]

You may want to check out "Kivio mp" 
(http://www.thekompany.com/products/kivio/) which is the"enhanced 
version" of Kivio (http://www.koffice.org/kivio/) which is distributed 
with K-Office.

I've only used the K-Office version (and that was quite a while ago), 
but "mp" might be worth a look -- there's a demo version available for 
download.  There are builds for Linux, Windows, and Mac.

Mike

>I looked into this same problem a few months ago and couldn't find anything better than Dia. I'm using it for data modeling, so I didn't really need a full Visio replacement, and settled on Oracle's JDeveloper 10g. It has great tools for ERD's and reverse engineering databases. It is a free download and runs equally well on Linux and Windows. Doesn't help you much for flow charting, but, as far as I found, Dia and Open Office are about it for diagraming. Both are good, but not quite as polished as Visio.
>
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>>>>"Clay Dowling" <clay at lazarusid.com> 05/09/05 02:27PM >>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>I've nearly won my boss over to using OpenOffice, since he found that
>purchasing Office doubles the cost of having a new PC.  If he ditches
>Office he can get everybody a new PC, which makes him the hero of the day.
>
>One major kink that we run into is that at least he and I need to use
>Visio at times (and other programmers should be using it).  We use it for
>flow charting and network diagrams.
>
>Is there a good open source replacement out there for Win32?  I tried Dia,
>but found that it did not compare well to Visio, especially for flow
>charting.  Likewise I gave OO.o Draw a try, which was a good deal better
>but still nowhere near as easy.
>
>We don't have the luxury of switching to Linux machines completely, since
>our flagship product is a Windows application and we use Delphi for
>development (and no, Kylix isn't an option, having been abandoned by
>Borland).  So I'm looking for a good free alternative to Visio.  It's the
>only fly in this particular ointment.
>
>Clay
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