Reviews
Review: ConceptDraw
- By Mike Gunderloy
- December 3, 2003
ConceptDraw V Professional Edition
$349
Computer Systems Odessa
Odessa, Ukraine
www.conceptdraw.com/en/
We all need a diagramming tool from time to time. Whether it's a
blocks-and-arrows architectural idea, a network diagram, or a map to the
company picnic, many of us turn to Microsoft Visio for this tool.
ConceptDraw Professional offers a powerful alternative to Visio that
works on both the PC and Mac platforms, and which Visio users will find
easy to learn. New in this version are an importer for Visio XML and an
online service to convert Visio files to ConceptDraw files (and vice
versa) to make the transition even easier.
If you load up ConceptDraw, you'll find a familiar sort of interface,
with objects you can drag from a variety of templates, a drawing
surface, and smart connectors. The connectors offer some options not
present in Visio, including finer-grained control over routing, and the
ability to automatically display breaks where connectors cross (think of
electrical circuit diagrams, for example).
There's a good selection of templates in the Professional Edition. Many
of these are similar to Visio templates, though you'll find changes and
improvements -- about twice as many shapes in the network diagram, for
example. This version also adds Wizards to guide you through setting up
some diagram types. You'll also find ODBC connectivity for things like
database diagrams.
With this version, ConceptDraw has also added scripting in their own
Basic dialect. This means you need to learn a new dialect - but it also
means that the scripting, like the rest of the application, works on
both PC and Mac. You can save and export in all sorts of formats, from
graphics files to Flash to HTML to ConceptDraw's own documented XML
format.
I didn't have any trouble building diagrams with ConceptDraw, though I
did at one point manage to get it to cough up an error message in
Cyrillic (when building an entity-relationship diagram from the SQL
Server Northwind database - it managed to build the diagram anyhow).
Some of the prompts are not quite grammatical English, either. But the
documentation, including the 300-page printed manual, is well-done (if
occasionally a bit stilted). ConceptDraw won't touch Visio for things
like high-end integration with Visual Studio, but for day-to-day
diagramming, it appears to be a viable contender.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.