Sometimes the best way to say it is with a picture. My experience has been that a picture is worth 900 or so words.
For drawing work diagrams, Visio is typically the king.
- It is made by Microsoft and big corporations typically have a volume license deal.
- It is pretty decent desktop software and fits most uses.
I was frustrated at Visio diagrams in our wiki when I was doing some user experience articles and creating lots of wireframes. I’d have to make a change, export to jpg, upload to wiki, reference the picture.
I’m way too lazy for that. I just want to make the change one time, and see it everywhere. I don’t like to repeat myself.
Since our wiki at work is running off of the excellent (but not free) Confluence Wiki from Atlassian, I was able to convince our architecture group to buy us a license for the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. After some initial slowness issues, which the Gliffy folks fixed, it’s a dream.
You create a diagram, you reference it in the wiki – if you need to change it, it’s easy. Change it back – no problem. Gliffy has versioning.
All told, it took much longer to get through the paperwork to buy the software than to install the software, but it’s well worth it so far!