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Mindjet is readying itself for bigger and better things to come in 2005 with its most recent upgrade to MindManager X5 Pro, its visual tool for planning, collaboration, and business process management (BPM). By refining its interface with Tablet and Pocket PCs, making large deployments easier, and partnering with other successful enterprise application vendors, Mindjet is positioning itself to become more widespread within the enterprise.

I wrote last year about Mindjet's new foundation that the company laid when it completely overhauled the product with Version 5.

Application Enhancements

In the past, the installation, distribution, and upgrades of MindManager were a manual and one-on-one process. While this worked fine for small teams, large-scale deployment was a challenge. Now, Mindjet has provided the ability to support teams of any size with ease by providing the functionality for administrators to perform large-scale deployments centrally. Now, administrators can push deployment to the desktop via an editable Windows Installer (MSI) file, so entire teams can receive upgrades much easier. Another option for teams in this release is the ability to run MindManager from a terminal server making it easier for any size team to use the tool.

As with any application upgrade, Version 5.2 comes with some performance and interface enhancements to make users' lives easier. These features range from the minor (such as notes being easier to work with by allowing for horizontal and vertical positioning on your maps) to the more polished (such as enhancing the interface with Microsoft Word to preserve topic/subtopic hierarchies when importing, and including table of contents and header/footers when exporting).

Another prelude of the big things to come can be found in the enhancements that impact your mobile users. While X5 Mobile always provided an interface for PDA users, the core X5 Pro product now more fully supports Tablet PCs. As anyone who has worked with mobile devices of any kind can attest, the inexact science of the user interfaces can leave us tapping and scribbling in plain air as we invent entirely new vocabularies. This new release simplifies writing in the tablet environment and employs real-time handwriting recognition to ease input.

Previews, Partnerships, and Things to Come

While the new application features are nice, it is the common theme that underlies them that points to the future direction of MindManager. Reading the tea leaves points you to the conclusion that Mindjet is moving in the direction of leveraging partnerships with other cutting-edge business solutions to make the power of visual mapping available to teams of all sizes, regardless of whether they sit in an office or on the road, and whether they need to create new maps or generate maps from existing data.

Two examples of the types of powerful partnerships I describe have occurred in the last few months.

In July of this year, Mindjet announced the preview release of a new tool called MindManager for Salesforce.com. This tool interfaces with existing Salesforce.com enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) applications. It allows sales teams to present existing Salesforce.com information in a single interactive and customizable digital dashboard.

Anyone who has worked with the vertical chain of command within a sales organization knows they require information in a format that is easy to visualize, read, understand, and interpret. Oftentimes, though, it is only management that ever really cares about the data in the CRM system. MindManager for Salesforce.com gives the sales professional a way to really exploit the customer information they input into the system. As a result, it solves two key issues for sales organizations:

1. It provides the incentive for sales professionals to enter sales data in the first place, since they will have direct access to the customer data in a format they can actually use.
2. Since the sales representatives will actually be using the data firsthand, they are more motivated to keep the data up to date and accurate, thereby increasing the quality of the sales data available to all levels within the organization.

In November, Mindjet announced another key partnership with CommerceQuest to develop a MindManager Accelerator Solution for their TRAXION Enterprise BPMS (business process management suite). This solution will enable users to rapidly build business process models by dragging and dropping using the MindManager graphical interface.

While MindManager has always delivered from a desktop solution standpoint, its release of enhanced mobile user and centralized deployment support coupled with the addition of these accelerator solutions open up a whole new world for integration with your company's existing enterprise solutions as well as your intranet and extranet.