title: Does a VCL OrgChart component with decent features exists? Is there a viable alternative?
body: <p>I am using <a href="http://www.devexpress.com/Products/VCL/ExOrgChart/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">DevExpress OrgChart component</a> that is still maintained but not developed since 2003 (fortunately bugs are fixed, but nothing more).</p>
  
  <p>Honestly this component, even if it starts to look too old still suffices my requirements except for 2 things:</p>
  
  <p>1) it doesn't support at all the staff feature, for understanding what I mean see <a href="http://www.capecodcommission.org/July2009OrgChart.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this image</a> (where the items in staff are Administration, Communication, IT, Special Projects).</p>
  
  <p>2) it arranges the items without optimizing the space, for example if there are 3 items at top level, and only the second item has 2 childs, the top items items are drawn more distantly, because of the 2 childs, there is no an option for "shirinking" the diagram.</p>
  
  <p>Of course the component misses tons of the features one would expect from an OrgChart tool, but in my case Those 2, and expecially (1) are important, the rest is lack of eye-candy.</p>
  
  <p>I look for VCL components, but if (as I fear, since I never found it) such component doesn't exist) I can see the following alternatives:</p>
  
  <p>i) using Hydra with .net winforms components</p>
  
  <p>ii) using ActiveX components. Between the 2 I would prefer ActiveX because of the .NET deployment hell (what I like about Delphi is that you ship the exe to the customer witn Win2k and it works). Anyway I never used an activeX control and I don't know which are the deployment issues, but I fear I will lose the opportunity of replacing an exe and upgrading the software.</p>
  
  <p>iii) hire a delphi component develoeper that can customize the DevEx component by adding feature (1) and maybe (2).</p>
  
  <p>I am stuck.</p>