Microsoft Visio, meet Web 2.0

Microsoft is also seeing demand for front-end for business intelligence users who want their data presented in a highly graphical way, he said. Thus, Microsoft plans to imbue its next version of Visio with Web services connectors so that users who lack programming skills can pull in data from databases or spreadsheets to create charts that are essentially updated in real-time, he said.

Golding envisions companies publishing those live Visio diagrams on their corporate intranets. Microsoft is unsure whether it charge client access licenses (CALs) to users that view or manipulate the Visio diagrams.

Despite the mashup-like nature of future Visio diagrams, Golding said Microsoft is not going totally Web 2.0 with Visio. There are no plans to release a 'lite' version of Visio for consumer users, nor release a hosted Software-as-a-Service version.

Already confirmed to be in the next version of Visio is a switch to the "Ribbon" interface used by Office 2007.

A more prosaic feature, a button to automatically align and space Visio charts, actually got the "biggest applause" when it was announced Tuesday, Golding said, acknowledging "there were some pain points in the past to making diagrams look good."