Microsoft Office Visio 2007 is targeted at visualizing information.  Visio can be used by many roles for different purposes such as: business processes, use cases, Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, network or infrastructure diagrams, and office communications.  Since pictures and diagrams frequently provide better communications than words alone, Visio can play an important role in any documentation and communications.  Vision is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of tools and integrates with other tools such as Word, Excel and SharePoint.

Within an application’s lifecycle, some teams choose to use Visio to augment their documentation.  Business analysts and product managers may use it to clarify business requirements and business processes, or for screen mockups and storyboards.  In fact, stpsoft's “Storyboarding for Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System” allows Visio to be used for storyboarding and screen layouts while using Team Foundation Server as a back-end to track requirements and related work.

Technical members of the development team may use Visio as an architecture, design and database modeling tool.  Support for UML as well as some integration with .NET and database engines allows it to provide logical and physical models for object-oriented components, service-oriented components, software systems and infrastructure.