While at L3 Communications, I led a team of developers, as the chief architect, in a ground up development project to build a fully customizable monitor and control system to operate all systems of a manned and unmanned satellite communications earth station.  It was written primarily in Java (Microsoft J++), visual basic, and  C++.  This project relied heavily on MS Comm for inter-operability between components of different languages.
 
As each earth station has different equipment and configurations, a custom UI is needed for each installation.  Instead of writing a bespoke authoring tool, we leveraged MS Visio as a UI and Layout design tool.  We integrated custom stencils to allow application specialists to design the workflow, look, and operation of the installation, then extracted the information from Visio at run time.   This saved man months of development and training became much easier as most of the field engineering using the system already knew Visio.