Mindjet Extends Power of Visual Collaboration

Mindjet Extends Power of Visual Collaboration

Paula Gregorowicz

6/30/2008

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MindManager, used by more than 1.3 million users globally, is a tool for mind mapping. The tool's creator, San Francisco-based MindJet, first unveiled the simple mind-mapping software years ago, and it soon became a full-fledged collaboration solution.

The product's popularity is on the rise, and earlier this year it won an Intranet Journal award for best collaboration tool.

MindManager is indeed more than just a piece of business software to draw pretty maps. It taps into the power behind any business process by providing users with the ability to visually:

Capture and organize information
Synthesize information into strategy
Transform strategies into action

Linear thinking and the documents that accompany it can often be limiting to a business' ability to truly tap into the creative potential and information critical to success. MindManager helps you transcend those limitations. Take for example this view of a business process and the activities within it from a MindManager perspective:

While it already had a tight integration with other business applications such as Microsoft Office and Internet protocols like RSS, collaborating with others and integrating it into the actual business process was not as seamless. Mindjet Connect is the answer to bridging this gap.

Now the power of MindManager 7 is available via subscription over the web so you can collaborate visually and remotely in real-time with all the members of your team whether or not they have MindManager installed on their desktop.

Mindjet Connect is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that ties together all the ideas, mind maps, and documents associated with a given business process in a common online, hosted workspace. The secure workspace comes with complete access and versioning control so that teams can work collaboratively wherever they are. Members of a workspace can literally create, edit, and share mind maps simultaneously in real-time. A quick visual representation of the workspace looks like this:

Some of the key attributes of Mindjet Connect are:

Unstructured yet organized (non-linear breeds creativity)
Graphical and Visual
Shared and secure workspaces
Live co-editing
Real-time web conferencing
Social Networking like team environment
Web or desktop based
Easy to navigate and interact with information

We hear the words real-time bantered about quite a bit. With Mindjet Connect, however, real-time editing really is instantaneous. As I participated in a live demo with Mindjet CEO Scott Raskin and several members of his team, I was able to watch various members update different parts of the same map at the same time and visually see the changes automatically.

Raskin said, "You can view who changed what and when at any level of a given map and literally find who is working on what part of the map in real-time." Indeed that is the case as with a right-click of the mouse we could see who was currently online and editing the very map we were and what map element they were currently working on.

With Mindjet Connect you are liberated from the constraint of users needing to have MindManager installed on their desktop. Through a browser (Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer are supported) members can work on the maps using MindManager web. This technology is browser based and relies on Flash for most of its functionality.

The functionality lost in the web only client (vs. the desktop version) are the ability to have as tight an integration with applications such as Outlook and the capability to work offline and import your changes back into the workspace.

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