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.

1. It is made by Microsoft and big corporations typically have a volume license deal.
2. 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!

But wait, there's more

• Just kidding, nothing's related to this.

This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International