Recently I have been involved in a service mapping exercise. During these offerings a specific tool is used to create the actual service maps: the Service Map Designer. This tool can be best described as a lightweight Visio specifically designed for creating service maps.
When installing the utility on a Windows 7 x64 workstation I ensured all prerequisites were in place. The tool installed flawlessly but when trying to create a new service map or opening up an existing one the following error is returned:
First step in the troubleshooting process was going over the prerequisites again:
Prerequisites for the tool as per the documentation:
- .Net framework 2.0
- Visio 2007
- Net Framework 4
- Visio 2010
Components installed on the x64 Windows 7 workstation:
All requirements are met, so no issues there.
Eventually it turned out the problem was related to the x64 installer of the package: although the OS on the workstation is x64, the installed version of Microsoft Office 2010 (Visio) was the x86 edition. To resolve the issue the x64 version of the Service Map Designer was removed and replaced by the x86 version.
Conclusion: the version of the Service Map Designer must be identical to the architecture of Office, not the OS. In other words: if you are running an x86 version of Microsoft Office (Visio), then the x86 installer of the Service Map Designer tool is to be used, regardless of the architecture of the Operating System.
To my knowledge this is not (yet) documented anywhere – so this post might save you some troubleshooting time.
