Microsoft Visio, meet Web 2.0

All told, Visio has 15 million users, according to Golding. It is most widely used in industries such as manufacturing, professional services and financial services, Golding said.

The number one user within companies, however, remains IT. Golding estimates about a third of Visio's customers are IT staffers, who use the software, for instance, to diagram their network infrastructure and workflow.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) are already adding features aimed at IT staffers. Codima Technologies' autoMap tool (PDF format) can automatically scan corporate networks and create Visio diagrams mapping them and how data flows through them.

Another partner, DataAssist GMBH, has a Visio add-on that automatically scans a corporate Active Directory, with all of its policies, and creates a Visio diagram of that. It just released an equivalent called Net Docs for SharePoint that allows Visio to scan a corporate SharePoint infrastructure and map out all of the sites in a tree-like diagram.

Microsoft plans to build some of that intelligence into the next version of Visio by adding support for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard, Golding said. That will enable users to, for example, automatically model a process and scan it to validate it. Eventually, processes may be managed and changed from the Visio diagram. That would turn the chart into a sort of real-time dashboard that could supplement or supplant systems management dashboards and consoles.