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MindJet Releases MindManager 8

By on November 11, 2008 in Software Reviews

Today, MindJet has released two new prod­ucts: MindManager 8 for Windows and MindManager Web.

What's new in MindManager 8

I’ve blogged about MindManager before as it is one of the main tools in my cre­ative arse­nal. If you haven’t tried MindManager before or have been curi­ous about it, now is the best time to try it and dive into mind map­ping. Here’s a few of the main new fea­tures in the new version.

What’s New in MindManager 8

Maps shar­ing: One of the main lim­i­ta­tions of using MindManager before was that it was dif­fi­ult to share those maps with peo­ple who did not have it. Exporting to Word and other for­mats could only go so far and, for me at least, my MindManager maps did not cre­ate good client deliv­er­ables even if they were very use­ful to me internally.

With MindManager 8, we can now export maps directly to PDF with embed­ded inter­ac­tive maps (a Flash movie from the map is embed­ded in the PDF). This is huge for me. We now can share our maps in a self con­tained and secure file for­mat and email them to any­one or make them eas­ily down­load­able from any Web site. Secondly, MindManager 8 also export directly to Flash itself so we can add inter­ac­tive maps to our Web sites. You can check out how that feels by look­ing at the map on the MindManager 8 prod­uct page on MindJet’s Web site.

Integrated Microsoft Office File Editing & Embedded Web Browser: MindManager 8 can now dis­play Web pages or edit MS Office doc­u­ments right from within MindManager’s inter­face. For me this is a very wel­come addi­tion as I often want to add links to Web pages to map top­ics. Now I don’t have to copy paste as there’s an “Add to Map” but­ton right in the embed­ded browser.

Integrated Content & ser­vices: It is now pos­si­ble to add search top­ics, RSS feeds or con­nec­tions to data­bases directly in maps by using what MindJet calls “Map Parts” that con­nect to search engines and other ser­vices or data stores. That way, top­ics in map can be kept fresh and rel­e­vant with updated data instead of being static.

Web ser­vices Map Parts included in MindManager 8 include Google, Yahoo and Windows Live (Search); MySpace and Facebook (social net­work­ing) and Amazon, eBay and StrikeIron D&B (eCom­merce). Database link­ers include Access, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, Excel and text files.

These are just a few of the new fea­tures included in MindManager 8. I will post again on why you would want to use an appli­ca­tion like MindManager but, in the mean­time, you can read my pre­vi­ous posts on mind map­ping from last year when I started using MindManager 7:

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Another Piece of the Mind Mapping for Project Management Puzzle

By on October 9, 2007 in Design & Development, Professional, Project Management

Following on my two pre­vi­ous posts on the sub­ject of mind map­ping (here and here), I have recently found another piece of my “mind map­ping for project man­age­ment” puzzle.

I’m cur­rently devel­op­ping my project plan­ning and track­ing method­ol­ogy based on mind maps made with MindManager and I am deter­min­ing both what spe­cific maps I’ll use and what are the exact client deliv­er­ables I’ll cre­ate from them. One par­tic­u­lar aspect I’ve often had trou­ble with is deter­min­ing a project’s sched­ule. I’ve now found the per­fect tool to help me with this pocess and it is a plu­gin for MindManager called JCVGantt Pro.

As the name implies, JCVGantt Pro cre­ates Gantt charts which are a sta­ple of project man­age­ment method­olo­gies. I had never used Gantt charts pre­vi­ously even­though I knew what they were (my other project track­ing appli­ca­tion Studiometry has them) but I had never used them before because, for me at least, they were a pain to cre­ate directly.

The amaz­ing thing with JCVGantt Pro is that it ties directly into MindManager maps and updates you make in one app are directly reflected into the other. What this means is that, from a spec­i­fi­ca­tions map for exam­ple, I can sep­a­rate each item into smaller spe­cific tasks which I can time esti­mate more eas­ily and cre­ate depen­den­cies between them using rela­tion­ships. When I then sent that to JCV Gantt Pro it cre­ates a time­line for the project as a Gantt chart and I can track tasks as they get done.

But the really great thing I dis­cov­ered which I didn’t know about pre­vi­ously is that, in JCV Gantt Pro and prob­a­bly in other sim­i­lar soft­ware, I can give each task a “resource”. Resources can be any­thing from spe­cific items like fonts or stock images you need to pur­chase (whose cost goes towards the project total) but, more impor­tantly in this case, “human resources”. The human resource con­cept is very sig­nif­i­cant because it defines how much time a “human resource” can devote to tasks within each week and the hourly cost of each “resource”. The time per week con­cept is impor­tant for me because I am a one man oper­a­tion and I can devote only a spe­cific amount of hours each week­day to Web work and slightly more on week­ends. What that means is that, not only does JCVGantt Pro cal­cu­lates the cost of the project based on all the tasks and their allo­cated resources but it “spreads” the work across the time­line accord­ing to the time con­straints of each resource.

In short, if a project required 100 hours to com­plete in total and I could work 40 hours a week on week­days and not on week­ends then it would require 2 1⁄2 weekes to com­plete the project. Since, in real­ity I can only devote about 22 hours a week to Web work (at best) spread on all 7 days of the week, the same project would take me over 4 1⁄2 weeks to com­plete and JCVGantt Pro will deter­mine that auto­mat­i­cally and draw the Gantt chart accord­ingly. It even goes fur­ther into spread­ing resources across con­cur­rently run­ning tasks and mov­ing tasks that depend on the com­ple­tion of pre­vi­ous ones fur­ther on the timeline.

I really wish I had dis­coverd all those incred­i­ble tools ear­lier. Not only do MindManager maps help me keep track of all project spe­cific info in one place but, with the help of JCV Gantt Pro, I can now give clients real­is­tic sched­ules and get much bet­ter cost esti­mates than ever before. My first project using this new method­ol­ogy is tak­ing me longer than usual to com­plete but from that project I will be able to cre­ate the map tem­plates I will re-​use on every future project..

There is a sig­nif­i­cant time invest­ment in the learn­ing process in addi­tion to the cost of the soft­ware the soft­ware for a one man shop like mine but I would really encour­age other free­lancers and small Web shops to explore sim­i­lar method­olo­gies if you are not already using them. It’s really prov­ing to work very well for me and will remove a lot of the tedium of project man­age­ment tasks that used to slow down projects for me. Not only that, it will help me cre­ate bet­ter early clients deliv­er­ables (spec­i­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ments, cre­ative briefs, proposals/​quotations, etc) but it will also help me cre­ate bet­ter qual­ity projects.

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Mind Mapping as a Creative and Project Management Tool

By on September 8, 2007 in Design & Development, Project Management

My last post described the process of how I chose a mind map­ping appli­ca­tion. The intro­duc­tion to that post briefly described why I thought it could be a valu­able tool for idea gen­er­a­tion and data orga­ni­za­tion and explained that I would use it as a project plan­ning and man­age­ment tool for my Web design and devel­op­ment projects.

Since then I have been read­ing a lot about project man­age­ment in both a gen­eral way and specif­i­cally with the aid of MindManager. It has been an eye open­ing expe­ri­ence for me and I have been learn­ing a lot. As a free­lancer, I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily have a very sys­tem­atic project man­age­ment process in place although I did have a gen­er­al­ized process I adhered to which included spe­cific “phases”. What I lacked is a way to orga­nize and track all the ideas, data, doc­u­ments and files linked to a project in a clear an effi­cient manner.

Now that I’ve started using MindManager in a cou­ple of real life projects, I already see that it’s going to become an invalu­able tool for me and I’ve only just scratched the sur­face of all that it can do so far. I’m try­ing to find the method­ol­ogy which is going to work for me and that is going to be an evolv­ing process. A lot of what has been writ­ten regard­ing project man­age­ment revolves around man­ag­ing larger teams of peo­ple in soft­ware devel­op­ment projects. For a free­lanc­ing Web designer like me, the process is going to be dif­fer­ent but all I’ve been read­ing has forced me to re-​think my meth­ods and this can only lead to improve­ments that are going to save me time and effort as well as help me serve my clients better.

Mind map­ping is not for evey­one but I haven’t been this excited about a new dicov­ery in a long time. From all I have read, there seems to be two dis­tinct approaches to mind map­ping. The inven­tor of the process, Tony Buzan advo­cates a very organic type of mind map­ping with lots of color, large images and curvy lines. To me, this would quickly become annoy­ing and takes away from the clar­ity of mind maps. My brain nat­u­rally likes a more lin­ear or orga­nized approach and more busi­ness ori­ented appli­ca­tions like MindManager make a lot more sense to me.

In any case, I would advise any cre­ative who like me had some prob­lems deal­ing with all the data, ideas, con­cepts we need to deal with to try mind map­ping soft­ware. It really helps make sense of the clut­ter and frees your creativity…

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My Search for Mind Mapping Software

By on September 3, 2007 in Design & Development, Personal, Professional

In the last few weeks I have been research­ing and eval­u­at­ing Mind Mapping soft­ware to aid me in the early plan­ning stages as well as struc­tur­ing of Web site design and re-​design projects. I think the con­cept of Mind Mapping offers a very effi­cient man­ner of gath­er­ing large amounts of data or ideas quickly then orga­nize it, for­mat it, tag it, trans­form it into an action-​plan, sched­ule, to do list or re-​use it in a mul­ti­tude of other formats.

If you are intrigued by the idea of Mind Mapping or have been look­ing for such soft­ware your­self, here’s some com­ments on my recent expe­ri­ence and short reviews of the 5 appli­ca­tions that made my short list and why. I’ve tried sev­eral oth­ers but I quickly “rejected” them for sev­eral rea­sons and I won’t men­tion them here.

You prob­a­bly should know right off the start that I am quite new to mind map­ping to begin with so my cri­te­ria and expe­ri­ence may dif­fer from some­one who’s been using it for a long time. I also plan to mostly use mind map­ping in rela­tion to the plan­ning and man­age­ment of Web site design and re-​design projects. During the course of my eval­u­a­tion, I’ve cre­ated and re-​created a map of a Web site I’ve been hired to re-​design. It’s a large Web site with a lot of con­tent as well as llinks to exter­nal resources. Re-​creating its struc­ture as a mind map has per­mit­ted me to iden­tify and note rep­e­ti­tion in con­tent, out of date con­tent and links as well as find rela­tion­ships between ele­ments found in sep­a­rate sec­tions of the site. It was the per­fect project for me to try out mind map­ping and I loved it.

The Mind Mapping Process

About the appli­ca­tions I tried them­selves, the first thing I have to tell you is that, aside from one excep­tion, it seems you really get what you pay for in the area of mind map­ping soft­ware because most mind map­ping apps only excel one area and are really weak in oth­ers. In order to under­stand what I mean by that you have to know that I divide the process of mind map­ping into 3 areas or steps. Not all areas may be as impor­tant to you as they were to me. Those area for me include, brain­storm­ing, editing/​adding infor­ma­tion and exporting.

These 3 areas are explained below:

1– The mind map­ping or brain­storm­ing process itself:
At this stage you need an app that gets out of the way and let you add top­ics and sub-​topics (some­times called ideas, nodes or items) and nav­i­gate them with the small­est amount of effort pos­si­ble. You’re try­ing to get your ideas or data down as quickly as pos­si­ble with­out any thought flow inter­rup­tions. The best apps let you start a map, then type your main idea/​topic directly then hit enter to “fin­ish” it then hit enter again to move to the next “sib­ling” topic or press Insert (close to Enter on most key­boards) to start a sub-​topic then type text again, Enter to fin­ish, Enter or Insert to move on. You would be sur­prised how many apps com­pli­cate this process need­lessly. Navigation is done sim­ply using the arrow keys. You should never have to touch the mouse to click in the map or worse still, click a but­ton in the map­ping app’s UI to add an item. Quick and sim­ple is the key here.

2– Editing and refin­ing the map by adding data and adding for­mat­ting:
This is where you add icons, rela­tion­ships, links (URLs or links to local doc­u­ments or inter­nal map top­ics, Web sites, etc), notes or attach­ments. This is also here where you for­mat the look of spe­cific items to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from one another and add fur­ther hier­ar­chy than the nat­ural topic/​sub-​topic/​sub-​sub-​topic hier­ar­chy the map con­tains nat­u­rally. This area is where all the mind map­ping apps I tried vary the most. The one I chose has the rich­est set of tools here (and I’m just start­ing to skim the sur­face), includ­ing named styles you can use to for­mat nodes/​topics eas­ily and spread changes auto­mat­i­cally to oth­ers who have the same style applied. You also need to be able to add notes to fur­ther “explain” cer­tain items or ideas fur­ther. Not all mind map­ping apps offer the abil­ity to add and for­mat notes. You also should be able to change the lay­out of the entire map. This area is very deep so I’ll stop here for now but there’s a lot of stuff you can do here to enrich the basic map data and give it more mean­ing. Some of them even give you the abil­ity to trans­form an item/​topic into a task with start and end dates, icons to denote per­cent­age of com­ple­tion and more. Several apps excel here but none of those I tried go as deep as the one I chose.

3– Exporting to other for­mats (for client deliv­er­ables like out­lines or inter­ac­tive maps they them­selves can play with for exam­ple):
This is the area where most mind map­ping apps fall very short for me with a cou­ple of excep­tions. To me and I may be one of the few think­ing this, what’s the use of cre­at­ing a detailed map if you can­not export this data into other use­ful forms. A sim­ple hier­ar­chi­cal text out­line really is some­thing very basic that should be easy to export. Even bet­ter is if links, icons and notes are exported along with the out­line and basic for­mat­ting applied to dif­fer­en­ti­ate all ele­ments. Better yet is tying the out­line lev­els to styles in an exist­ing Word tem­plate file directly. Again, only one app goes the extra mile and many do not go past the first step which is a pretty use­less sim­ple graphic export (inserted in a Word, Powerpoint or PDF file). Here, you’ll here a lot of promises of MS Office inte­gra­tion and what-​not. But if, like me, your idea of inte­gra­tion goes fur­ther than adding a solid bitmap image copy of your map to a Word or PowerPoint file with no text what­so­ever, then many mind map­ping apps will dis­ap­point you here. Only 3 apps amongst those I tried offer any­thing really use­ful here and all 3 actu­ally go above and beyond in dif­fer­ent ways.

The Reviews

So what are all these apps I’ve kept hint­ing about. I’ll spare you the worst and will only high­light 4 of them and men­tion a 5th because I think it has great poten­tial and offers much more than mind mapping.

1– In first place and the top of the crop for me is MindManager 7 from Mindjet. It is also unfor­tu­nately one of the most expen­sive of the lot at $349.00 but it’s already help­ing me greatly start a redesign project on the right foot. This one is deep and although it doesn’t offer the stun­ning Flash export of the next sec­ond place app, MindJet offers a free reader appli­ca­tion you can point your clients to if you want them to inter­act with the real app and see things the same way you did. Otherwise it can export to Word with a full out­line, TOC, full map images and all the data and “meta­data” you added to the map. Amazing. It also has 2 fla­vors of Powerpoint export which I haven’t really explored yet. Next is Visio export. As I don’t have Visio I can­not com­ment. Next is MS Project export which ties to the tasks ori­ented edit­ing I hinted at ear­lier. I don’t have Project either but think Gantt charts and the like. Seems quite pow­er­ful. Next still is what seems like great inte­gra­tion with Outlook. Think tasks again, sched­ules and the like. I don’t use Outlook any­more and never did in that way so I can­not say how it does here. PDF export could be bet­ter but i goes beyond insert­ing a sim­ple solid graphic in a PDF file. Think editable text here (it’s rarer than you’d think). I’m still learn­ing the app so I’m sure there’s much more I could men­tion. Last point is about the UI. MindManager (like my Honorable men­tion app below) use a MS Office 2007 “ribbon-​like” UI. Not every­one likes this but I use Office 2007 at work and although it took me a few days to get used to it, now love it nd would never go back. MindManager’s UI is def­i­nitely the most sophis­ti­cated of all the apps I tried and it’s very unclut­tered for an app that offers so many tools at your fin­ger­tips. See it here:

http://​www​.mind​jet​.com

2– In sec­ond place for me is FreeMind… yes the free, open-​source mind map­ping app. It excels at brain­storm­ing, does an ade­quate job of for­mat­ting and it offers the most incred­i­ble and unique inter­ac­tive Flash export. It also export to a few other spe­cial for­mats like the also open-​source ToDoList appli­ca­tion. It has good Word export as well but it’s been a while since I used that so I can­not remem­ber the level of detail. Drawbacks include some rough areas due to the fact that it’s still beta soft­ware (0.8.0 is the sta­ble release, lat­est is 0.9.0 beta 12). Well worth con­sid­er­ing. See it here:

http://​free​mind​.source​forge​.net/​w​i​k​i​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​M​a​i​n​_​P​age

3– In third place for me is MindApp from Varatek soft­ware. Very inex­pen­sive at $29.95 and very good at steps 1 and 2 (brain­storm­ing and for­mat­ting). Where it fell short for me is export. Well worth down­load­ing the trial, espe­cially if you don’t fore­see need­ing very detailed export­ing into other for­mats. It was on my short list. See it here:

http://​www​.min​dapp​.com

4– In fourth place is The Brain’s PersonalBrain. A most intrigu­ing app which I really tried to like more. It may serve some­one else’s needs bet­ter. It is on the expen­sive side (not far behind MindManager) and doesn’t have nearly the same depth in the for­mat­ting depart­ment. Maybe I would have dis­cov­ered more had I spend more time with it. Great brain­storm­ing abil­i­ties and very good Web export with a data pane at the bot­tom and inter­ac­tive map at the top. See it here:

http://​www​.the​brain​.com/

Honorable men­tion goes to SmartDraw 2008. It doesn’t have as seam­less brain­storm­ing abil­i­ties as the 4 oth­ers but it still does a good job of it. It excels at the for­mat­ting aspects. It also offers a lot more than mind map­ping so, even­though that’s not its core pur­pose, it’s very good value for the money. Great for­mat­ting abil­i­ties, dis­ap­point­ing export­ing. Not exactly cheap either but I’ll keep an eye on its growth. Another point against it for me was a very clut­tered ribbon-​like UI. Much less suc­cess­ful here than MindManager. It some­times feel more like a big glo­ri­fied Microsoft Wizard than a draw­ing appli­ca­tion. It may be that it’s aimed at busi­ness peo­ple and I’m a designer used to apps like Fireworks, Illustrator, FreeHand or InDesign. Still well worth try­ing but you bet­ter be quick about it… it only offers a pity­ful 7 days trial. For an app sold at nearly $300 USD, this is rather cheap IMO. See it here:

http://​www​.smart​draw​.com/

Last topic I’d like to touch is sup­port and user com­mu­nity. Only two of the com­mer­cial apps I tried have forums: MindManager and PersonalBrain. FreeMind has a forum on SourceForge where devel­op­ers seem to be active. I’ve also tried to con­tact two com­pa­nies. One is SmartDraw which I con­tacted to express how dis­ap­point­ing I though their export­ing abil­i­ties were (for­got to com­plain about their ridicu­lous trial’s lenght). I then had a very inter­est­ing email con­ver­sa­tion with one of their sales rep over the course of 2 or 3 days… even though I was clear I would not buy their prod­uct. They seemed open and eager to get user com­ments and sug­ges­tions. Kudos to them for this.

On the other end of the spec­trum was MindApp. I wrote them with a cou­ple of pre-​sales ques­tions using a form on their site. Never heard back. To me this is unfor­giv­able, even when your prod­uct is as inex­pen­sive as theirs is.

Conclusion

I hope my com­ments in this post will help any­one look­ing to get into mind map­ping. The process of try­ing out mind map­ping apps has def­i­nitely sold me on the idea of mind map­ping itself. I find that using soft­ware to enter and orga­nize ideas and data quickly very free­ing. It also cre­ates some­thing tan­gi­ble and much more mal­leable than scrib­bles on a piece of paper. You can come back to your map, refine it, add to it and re-​export or re-​purpose it in a vari­ety of use­ful forms (den­pend­ing on the app you choose of course). It’s also a lot quicker than doing it on paper would be for me.

I love mind map­ping now even­though I’m far from being an expert and can’t wait too apply the process to other areas of both my pro­fes­sional and per­sonal lives and see how it can help me further.

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