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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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