I'm trying to justify a MS Visio license.
Immediately I can think of a few ways that I would use it in my shop, and apply it to my development projects:
I know these things can be done in MS Word's drawing tools, but as far as I'm concerned, they look sloppy and it's a pain in the butt to use.
How else do you use Visio in your shop?
Does your shop actually use the diagrams that you create in Word? If they do, make a similar one in Visio and show it to them. The look is much cleaner, and you should be able to do it in half the time or less, which means there is cost savings for them. You can actually prove what the cost savings is if you know on average how many diagrams are created per month.
The cost savings will sell it.
You can insert/embed a Visio object into word. This is how I frequently do it. That way you don't have a bunch of scattered word and visio docs that have to be assembled for reports. From there you can write a standard software requirements specification but include pretty flow charts, class diagrams, database schemas, etc.
We use Visio quite often in our shop. Just in the last month we have used it for the following types of diagrams:
You could look into SmartDraw. It's less expensive, but very powerful and easy to use. It covers all your requirements and then some. I've used it for a couple of years now, and I have been quite pleased with it.
Pros:
Cons:
I work at a consulting company that does system integration. I use Visio heavily to create high-level architecture documents (e.g. systems architecture, deployment model, interface diagrams, etc.). Visio is not my preferred tool, as I work on a Mac (thank you VMWare Fusino), but it does seem to be the de facto standard when sharing diagrams between companies. I haven't encountered a company that didn't have Visio. For this reason, I use Visio.
In addition, recent versions of Visio have nice 3D graphics of system components that look better than the traditional 2D graphics.
I never use Visio, except to produce an ad-hoc diagram. For more structured diagrams, I prefer to use a UML modeling tool, like Sparx Enterprise Architect.
We use Dia http://live.gnome.org/Dia for diagrams and OpenProj for project planning.
It's free but not very well made software. My shop doesn't really use UML, etc
I've spent quite some time looking for a good opensource UML tool and I finally stumbled upon Star UML. It supports most of the UML 2 diagrams that you'll ever really need and it's also a lot faster then the equivalent Java based UML editors (e.g. Poseidon and Borland Together).
It supports exporting diagrams in various formats including GIF and WMF, which makes it easy to use the output in Powerpoint and Wiki documentation.
Actually, if you use Visual Studio, the 2010 Ultimate release lets you create UML class, sequence, component, use case, and activity diagrams for your development projects. You can link UML diagrams to Visual Studio Team Foundation work items. You can also create sequence, dependency graphs, and layer diagrams from code.
I've posted more links on my profile for more info.
I use it mainly for IT related diagrams like UML diagrams, application architecture, SQL Server Architecture etc. Still exploring new features in Visio 2010. Dynamic data driven shapes and web sharing is really great addition..! You can download free trial or buy visio 2010 at visiotoolbox.
Honestly, although Visio is an OK tool, I don't think it does that great at UML and ER diagrams. I prefer a tool designed to create those types of diagrams, and for UML, I especially like it integrated into my IDE, especially for reverse engineering UML diagrams from existing code.
For project management-related diagrams and workflow diagrams, Visio is probably better. Although if you had to use a Microsoft produce for project management, I would suggest the appropriate use of Word and Excel alongside Project and Visio when necessary. And for straight up documentation, nothing beats exporting the diagrams from various tools and putting them into a Word document (and then exporting as PDF to capture a snapshot version of the document).
As a disclaimer: I've heard that Visio 2010 has a good number of improvements made over past versions of Visio. The last version I used was 2005, I believe. I will be installing both Visio and Project using my MSDN Academic Alliance access when I get back to school.