Visio has been described as Microsoft's diamond in the rough. It's a lesser-known gem of an application, a diagramming tool that can display company sales, profits, employee performance, map out a crime scene or help configure the wiring for an airplane.

With such broad capabilities for graphing, mapping and charting complex ideas, Visio has long been a favorite of employees in technical fields, providing a cost-effective tool with many of the same capabilities of high-end engineering tools such as CAD.

With the recent release of Microsoft Office Visio 2003, Microsoft has returned Visio to its roots, improving the diagramming features and libraries of shapes that have made the application a hit for years. But there's also new features in Visio 2003: integration with XML provides extensive capabilities to integrate with back end servers, databases, Web services and other applications enabled by Visio's, and a new ActiveX control allows organizations and developers to use Visio 2003 as a front end to a line of business application, or embed Visio in a custom solution, providing customers with a flexible tool to meet a variety of diagramming needs.

PressPass recently sat down with Visio General Manager Richard Wolf to discuss the next version of Visio, Wolf has been in the graphics industry for over 20 years now, ten spent at Microsoft,. is a founding member of the Office team, and recently. has also worked on products such as InfoPath. Wolf discusses how Visio's improvements to its core functionality can help engineers and developers, and how its new capabilities for integration with live data create a whole new role for Visio in the emerging discipline of business process management.