Microsoft Corp. today announced the addition of the XML schema used by Microsoft® Office Visio® 2003, DataDiagramML, to the Microsoft Open and Royalty-Free Office 2003 XML reference schema program announced in November 2003. Through the Microsoft documentation and a royalty-free license, customers and partners can take advantage of the XML schema in its diagramming and data visualization tool. The availability of the Visio schema builds on Microsoft's commitment to XML by providing a complete and W3C-compliant description of the Visio Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format, enabling organizations to access information captured in their Visio diagrams and use it with other XML-enabled applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, as part of their business processes. While Microsoft is providing this documentation in an effort to aid solution providers and in-house developers who want to create Visio solutions, some early adopters already have begun developing solutions with Visio 2003, and have touted DataDiagramML's usefulness in creating data visualization solutions.