File Locations

[Paul Herber]

You could create an installer file that sets up the files and paths so Visio knows where to find things, but then have SVN just update the actual files. I see no reason why that shouldn't work.

[Nikolay]

The needed part here is publishing (via windows installer)
So that you can specify "alternate" or "user interface" names for the stencil/template files.

You could do that as well with Visio Solution Publishing tool from Visio SDK (will require a bit more efforts though).
But yep, installer might not quite fit in the SVN "xcopy" deployment scenario - you'll need an extra step to pack stencils/templates in the installer somewhere in the process.

In principle, well, you can have a "build server" somewhere which pulls the templates/stencils out of the SVN and builds the installer for "end-users".
Or you could do that packaging via SVN post-commit hook for example. Not sure if it all worth the efforts though.

As far as I understand, you have a corporate LAN and cannot move your files outside of the company.. right?

[Paul Herber]

You'd only need to do the installation once, you could probably use dummy files of small size, once the MSI has run you could extract the real files from SVN at any time. A new update from SVN won't require the installer to be run again (unless you change filenames or something of course).