Also of great interest in PersonalBrain 6 is its tighter integration with the developer’s online map sharing service, WebBrain.com. In the past, to publish a brain to this online community, you had to first “zip” your file, then manually upload it. With version 6, the process has been simplified; all you have to do is use the “synchronize with WebBrain” command in the program’s file menu to send your map to this online repository. By default, all of the files you sync to WebBrain.com are private. This gives you the freedom to play around and get comfortable with these tools before sharing your maps with the world.

In addition to private, you can designate uploaded brain files as unlisted (only visible to people you specify) or public (accessible by anyone). In addition, You can configure Personal Brain 6 to automatically synchronize your maps to WebBrain.com – which makes it act like an online backup system for your brains. You can also use this capability to synchronize your brains between several computers, especially useful if you utilize Personal Brain at work and want to be able to access your maps from your home PC.

Signing up for an account at WebBrain.com was simple and straightforward. I created a brain to document the new features of PersonalBrain 6 and uploaded it, which is accomplished via a “synchronize with WebBrain” command in the file menu. My brain was quickly uploaded; when the process finished, a message popped up momentarily on screen, informing me that all of the thoughts in my brain synced successfully. Good attention to usability! When I looked at my WebBrain account, my brain was there, with a thumbnail image displayed side by side with some usage statistics. When I viewed it, it looked exactly like the desktop version, right down to the slowly rotating shape at the center of the “plex” (PersonalBrain’s name for the program’s workspace).

Later that day, from a different PC, I logged in to WebBrain.com, opened this brain and added several more topics to it. The interface of WebBrain is simple and straightforward. It does one thing and does it very well.WebBrain.com has also been enhanced to easily share your maps with others. You can e-mail or tweet links to your brains from within this browser-based application; it gives you the option of sharing an entire map or creating a link to a specific thought within a map. In addition, you can easily generate code to embed your brains within any web page, in much the same way that you can embed a YouTube video in your website.

Under the hood, Personal Brain 6 has a new database back end, which is faster and more reliable than previous versions, especially for large maps (more than 10,000 thoughts). According to the developer, Personal Brain 6 is twice as fast as version 5.5. This new “engine” will be most appreciated by businesses that are using PersonalBrain to create knowledge bases with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of topics. In this new version, brains can now be unlimited in size.

User interface improvements

The tabbed area at the bottom of the screen – where you can view notes, attachments, tags and other topic embellishments – has been improved in PersonalBrain 6 to make better use of space and reduce visual clutter. The calendar has also been updated so you can view more events. In addition, the PersonalBrain calendar now syncs with Google Calendar. The enables you to “push” calendar items to your Google Calendar account and vice versa.

One of the truly unique new features of PersonalBrain 6 is something the developer calls “transparent mode,” which makes your brain translucent and enables you to access and use any applications that are running below it, while at the same time utilizing the full functionality of PersonalBrain. Clever? Undoubtedly. Useful? Yes. Unless you have a large flat screen that enables you to display programs side by side or are one of those rare people who only have one or two programs open at a time, windows are almost always stacked on top of each other. Transparent mode eliminates the need to toggle back and forth between PersonalBrain and your other applications.

Transparent mode can also help you to streamline your productivity when doing online research. You can be viewing information on a web page, and making notes about your findings in your brain. Once your map is in transparent mode, you can switch it to something called mini-mode, which displays only the active topic. If you click on the name of that topic, a search bar pops up and you can easily search for content within your brain, without having to open it up on your desktop. These are some innovative user interface developments, to be sure. I’m just not certain how often I would employ them in day-to-day use of the program.

Links to individual thoughts

With this release, the developers has added a  new capability called “thought URLs” that enables you to reference a specific thought in your brain from anywhere. If you create a thought URL and place it on your desktop, for example, double-clicking on it launches PersonalBrain and takes you directly to that thought in your brain. No other developer of mind mapping software offers this capability.

To test this, I tried it with one of the topics in my PersonalBrain 6 features map. You make a topic active in the plex, then right-click on it and select the “copy thought URL” command. It generates one of the longest and ugliest URLs I’ve ever seen. But that doesn’t matter, because this capability worked flawlessly. The developer says this new feature also enables you to create links between brains; you simply place the thought URL for the map and topic to which you want to link in the notes area of the brain you’re currently working on.

I can see how this capability could be very useful to serious users of PersonalBrain. Why create a large brain containing a lot of data, only to have to open the program and drill down to your topic with multiple clicks – or be forced to conduct a keyword search for it and then sift through the results? This capability enables you to create a shortcut to that exact topic, so you can reach it in a single click (or a double-click from the Windows desktop).

Concluson

PersonalBrain 6 continues to break new ground in power, flexibility and usability. In particular, thought URLs are a welcome addition, because they enable you to access a specific piece of knowledge within a visual map that may contain hundreds or thousands of topics. In large knowledge bases, that’s absolutely essential. I also really like the seamless integration of PersonalBrain and WebBrain.com, because it enables you to access your brains anywhere. Other features, such as transparent and mini-mode, may be useful to you or maybe not, depending upon your work style. Finally, in a world where social networking has quickly become the norm, the ability to share maps via tweets, e-mails and other online sharing services is much appreciated.

PersonalBrain 6 is a complimentary upgrade to registered PersonalBrain 5 users who purchased after February 1, 2010. New Upgrades are $119.95 for other users of PersonalBrain 5. A new license for Personal Brain 6 Pro is $249.95. For $50 more, you can purchase the Pro version plus a one-year WebBrain premium services package. Otherwise, after a 30-day free trial, continued use of the publishing and sharing features of WebBrain costs $6.25 per month.

The developer recently released Amode version 2, which extends this intriguing information-centric model even farther. The result in a mature product that gives you even more ways to express your information. In this product review, we’ll take a deeper look at the new features of Amode 2 and how they benefit business users.

Method Neutral: An information-centric model

As part of the launch of Amode 2, Mindsystems introduced the world to a new term to explain its robust, flexible model for handling information and data: Method Neutral. The idea behind this concept is that software should ideally enable you to focus on producing high quality results, quickly, using a variety of working styles. In other words, the nature of the information should dictate its format, not the way the software is structured.

Amode certainly practices what Mindsystems preaches, providing a rich palette of ways to represent your ideas and projects. For a deeper understanding of the Method Neutral concept, I recommend that you read this interview between mind mapping expert Wallace Tait (from the VisualMapper and Hypershifters blogs) and John England, the founder of Mindsystems.

Amode 2′s well-designed user interface

Amode 2 retains the program’s efficient two-windowed user interface (click on the image above right for a larger view of it). The left two-thirds of the screen is a larger workspace, where your projects may be viewed as a “tree” (something like a hierarchical text outline, with icons next to each topic that indicate what else is attached to it), a GANTT chart or a calendar. Each topic is a self-contained collection of information.

There’s also a briefcase view, introduced in the first version of Amode, which enables you to view the contents of Amode files side-by-side and drag topics from one to the other. To the right of the workspace is a nested, tabbed interface, which gives you access to topics notes, attachments, tasks, alarms, relationships and something new called the ThoughtPad.

Next to this window panel is a narrow vertical column called system tools. If you click on the left-pointing arrow at the top of it, a panel slides out to display another set of tabs to access project resources (people or equipment assigned to a project and calendar items), project templates and stored filters that are a part of the Amode file in which you’re working.

The whole user interface is well-designed and intuitive, which is impressive considering the immense amount of resources and data that an Amode file can contain.

Improvements to the tree view

Since this is the view where users of Amode are likely to spend much of their time, Mindsystems paid attention to making this outline view more powerful. Version 2 now supports drag and drop of links and multiple attachments. Also, version 2 now includes a Microsoft Outlook plugin that enables you to send the contents of individual e-mails or folders of messages to Amode topics. Because Outlook is such a ubiquitous tool in many corporate environments and important information and knowledge is often embedded in e-mail messages, I view this as a critically important new feature.

Attachment and link management is also much easier in Amode version 2. If you add multiple attachments to a topic, clicking the attachment icon causes a multi-select menu to pop up, giving you single-click access to all attachments. I tried this by adding three attachments to a single topic, which must be done in an attachments properties tab to the right of the workspace. But when I clicked on the attachments icon back in the workspace, the multi-select menu popped up just as advertised, giving me instant access to all three files – without having to mouse over to the attachments tab again. Yeah, it’s a little thing, but it’s a time-saver, in much the same way as context-sensitive right-click menus are.

ThoughtPad adds a visual dimension to Amode 2

Amode 2 puts the principle of method neutrality into practice by offering a number of new features that enable users to represent their ideas with even greater flexibility. One major addition in this new version is the ThoughtPad, which enables you to attach a diagram, mind map or flow chart to any topic within an Amode file to help explain it – think of it as a visual mapping program embedded within a suite of information management tools and you’ll get a clearer picture of the relationship between ThoughtPad and Amode.

You access the ThoughtPad via the tabbed interface on the right side of the Amode user interface. It opens to reveal a set of shapes and connectors, which you can drag and drop into a mini-workspace to produce a variety of visual diagrams. There is also space for “custom tools” at the bottom of this vertical panel, where you can add images from your computer to the toolset of the ThoughtPad. Nice!

As you might expect, a mind map or flow chart can easily spread out to take quite a bit of room horizontally, so I was pleased to see that you can drag the window border between your Amode outline and the ThoughtPad to make more space for your diagrams.  There’s also a zoom control to give you greater flexibility in viewing your diagrams.  If you create a diagram in ThinkPad, Amode adds a little diagram icon to the currently-selected topic. If you click on the icon, Amode instantly takes you to the ThoughtPad view.

You can attach multiple diagrams to a single topic, which can come in handy: Let’s say you created a first iteration of a diagram, but you’re not quite satisfied that it communicates what you need it to. You can add a new ThoughtPad to the topic, and take a fresh approach to diagramming your idea, without discarding the original one. In addition to creating ThoughtPads at the topic level, Amode 2 also enables you to create one that describes your overall project visually.

Surprisingly, you can export individual ThoughtPad diagrams in several formats in Amode 2. This gives you the flexibility to share your visual ideas with others in an image, notes or an Amode-specific TPD file format, while still maintaining the entire project within Amode. That means you could share a diagram with a colleague, without sending them the entire Amode file (which may contain proprietary information or may just be too large to e-mail to him or her). This new feature enables you to split off a TPD file and send it to your coworker. This export capability also enables you to build up a template library of ThoughtPad diagrams for future use, according to the developer. This could be quite useful, I think.

I like the thinking behind the ThoughtPad, but I found it to be somewhat clunky at times.  For example, while trying to create a simple flow chart, I connected a square to a hexagon, and was disappointed to discover that I couldn’t connect the line at the mid-point of the side of the hexagon, only on its corner. The result was a cockeyed line that  just didn’t look right to me.

On another occasion,  I created a simple mind map with curved connector lines, and found that the arrow heads got buried under the edges of several of the subtopics – until I used the drag handles to reshape them. These are minor concerns which shouldn’t overshadow the fact that ThoughtPad brings an important visual dimension to Amode’s toolbox.  It’s a great lightweight tool for sketching out simple business processes and ideas.

New skeleton view gives linear look at your projects

This new view takes the outline and converts it into a tabular type of view, with your topics in a hierarchy in the column near the left edge of the workspace and topic relationships, resources, attachments, links, notes, ThoughtPad diagrams and alarms arrayed in columns to the right. The width of each column is adjustable. To the left of the topics are columns for priority and percentage completed. Mindsystems characterizes skeleton view as more of a linear look at your project.

Project management tools receive enhancements

At its core, Amode 2 is more of a project management tool than a visual mapping program. In version 2, Mindsystems has beefed up the program’s capabilities to handle just about any type of project you can throw at it. The project management center of Amode is chart view (formerly called Gantt view in version 1.0). You can now double-click on topics within this view to edit them. A Gantt summary function has been added to show the full project task list.

Significantly, you can now click a single button to view the critical path for your project – the shortest time possible to complete it, based upon the duration of each task and their dependencies. In addition, you can view all tasks associated with a particular employee or resource. And finally, printing has been improved: You can exclude priority fields and left align topics to save space and fit more of your Gantt chart on less paper. You can also set alarms for task deadlines and send SMS notifications from within chart view.

Amode version 1 contained a calendar view, but it was somewhat rudimentary. In version 2, it has been improved to behave more like a paper calendar book. For example, you can now add what Mindsystems calls sticky notes to it. When you actually create a sticky note in this view, however, it looks more like a yellow appointment, which you can drag to extend its duration.

Filtering gets even more powerful in Amode 2

One of the standout features I highlighted in my review of Amode version 1 was its powerful, flexible toolset for filtering the contents of your projects. This has been further refined in version 2. A quick topic search capability has been added to the program’s tree view, which enables you to quickly jump to see specific topics. You can also do this in the briefcase mode across multiple projects.

In the filter bar at the bottom of tree view, you can also now elect to show the child branches associated with filter results and split these filter results off into a new Amode file. This is a powerful new capability, which enables you to zero in on topics that meet certain criteria in your current project – such as all of the tasks associated with a particular employee or resource – and then use that subset of information to generate a new Amode project file. Very cool!

SMS capabilities for alarms

Alarms were a key project management feature in Amode version 1, but in version 2 they have been significantly enhanced. You can now schedule alarms to be sent via SMS (short message service) or e-mail to groups of up to 20 people – even when Amode isn’t running. This could be very powerful for small, geographically dispersed work groups. It does this via an online SMS queueing service, which works with over 800 networks in over 200 countries – sounds fairly ubiquitous to me! You can purchase SMS credits from within Amode 2, to ensure that your project communications always flow smoothly.

This looks like another important productivity enhancing tool that should keep work groups on track and on time, whether they are sitting in front of their PCs working within Amode or traveling somewhere with a smart phone or other portable communication device.

Other useful features

Expanded import/export capabilities: Amode 2 can now import and export data with Microsoft Word, Excel, Project and PowerPoint, which should significantly increase its appeal to business users. The program gives you an impressive array of import/export options to include/exclude selected information – which is quite important, because often your work files will include information you don’t want to share (proprietary information, or background information that’s not relevant to what needs to be shared at the moment). If your firm is more of an open source shop, Amode 2 can also import and export data with OpenOffice Writer and Calc.

Customize toolbar: A blank tab in Amode 2′s ribbon toolbar invites you to populate it with the command you use most often – a real time-saver for power users, because it significantly reduces the need to switch between different tabs in the ribbon toolbar.

Templates: You can create and store templates based on entire Amode solution files or topics. This makes it easy for work teams to re-use assets, so each project doesn’t need to be created from scratch. In addition, from Amode’s template view, you can drag and drop an existing template onto the workspace to start a new project – nice! An impressive collection of templates is included with Amode 2 to help you accomplish common business tasks, such as report writing, meeting planning, checklists and business planning.

As I was playing around with these templates, I was able to drag and drop a particular type of SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis tool into my open project file. What a great way to start a new project or enhance one you’ve started to work on! I suspect these templates will be heavily employed by new users of Amode 2, who will appreciate how they help to illuminate what the program is capable of.

Conclusion

As a tool for powerful, flexible management of information and projects, Amode 2 has no peer. It’s not quite a mind mapping tool or an outliner or a project management application – but yet it combines the best capabilities of each of these applications to create a truly unique and valuable business productivity tool. As you switch from one view to another in Amode, it illuminates new aspects of your project, which can lead to valuable insights and ideas – a very good thing! It also holds a lot of promise as a tool for helping busy executives to manage information overload, especially with its new Outlook integration.

Mindsystems says Amode 2 offers a “unified approach to information management.” Considering all of the well-integrated tools and capabilities Amode 2 offers to business users, I believe they have achieved this vision. Amode 2 is the perfect tool to help today’s information manager meet the challenges of their work head on.

A single-user license of Amode 2 is US$207.87; an upgrade from version 1 is $115.48. A trial version can also be downloaded from the Mindsystems website.

Easier, more powerful reports with display filtering: A new reports quick-pick menu enables generating most reports with just two clicks. Powerful custom reports using multiple criteria can now be defined utilizing multiple types, tags, and attachment criteria. In addition, custom reports can be named and saved for future use.

Faster, more flexible visualizations, including improved animation and maintaining a memory of the last view that was in use when the file was closed. In addition, on mouseover of a link, if either one of the links is off-screen, it is displayed on screen while the link is highlighted. Also, the layout stabilizes and reacts faster to input such as repositioning of thoughts or linking and unlinking of thoughts.

Streamlined user interface: Many menus and other user interface elements have been cleaned up and refined. Version 5.5 also offers a new tags user interface that displays tags in multiple columns for more efficient use of dialog box real estate. In addition, default notes styles let you easily modify colors and fonts for all notes within your Brain.

Revamped calendar with recurring events and more: The event creation and editing user interface has been overhauled and the entire events system rewritten to enable additional capabilities, including recurring appointments and additional fields on every event to record the appointment location, description and percent complete. In addition, reminders in version 5.5 are now optional and can be set to occur at a customizable amount of time in advance of the event.

Keyboard shortcuts for virtually every command: Most commands in PersonalBrain 5.5 can be accessed by keyboard commands, which are now user-configurable.

Integrated screen-capture capability: This is a convenient method for grabbing any portion of your screen for use as a Thought icon. From the Thought menu, select Capture Thought Icon. PersonalBrain minimizes and a selection target appears on your desktop, which you can then use to select any area of your screen. I used this feature to select a desktop icon, which was instantly added to the presently selected topic in PersonalBrain.

Thought spellchecking: In the new version of PersonalBrain, when you create a thought, misspelled words are automatically highlighted and can be right-clicked to view. Words can be added to the program’s dictionary, which is also used to spell-check thought topic notes.

Expanded preferences: Expanded preferences allow fine tuning of the user interface, including options for wander speed, size of “distant” thoughts (when this option is turned on, you can view two levels of child thoughts instead of one), spacing between thoughts and much more. PersonalBrain 5.5′s export capabilities are also improved; you can now export thoughts, attachments and notes into a flat or hierarchical set of folders with a single command.

There are many more updates included in PersonalBrain 5.5, which is a free upgrade for users of version 5.0. For more details, please see the PersonalBrain 5.5 updates page.

No kidding – this is the most concise, compelling overview of the challenges of doing business in these uncertain times that I have read  to date.

Here are some of the key thoughts from the article, along with my observations:

“Leaders of many of today’s more mature organizations don’t have the right mindset or practices to help their organizations survive. They grew up with management practices suited to a different age—one with higher barriers to entry, greater transaction costs, fewer capable competitors, growing and increasingly affluent markets and far less information. The environments they are facing now, however, are less predictable, more complicated and more volatile.”

The high degree of complexity and uncertainty that managers and leaders must deal with today requires better planning tools – tools that can help them to visualize complex sets of information, organize it quickly and effectively, extract important insights and ideas from it and utilize it to make better decisions. Mind mapping software is perfectly suited to these needs, which is why it enjoys increasing popularity in business today. I like to call it” the savvy executive’s secret weapon.”

“As uncertainty increases, companies are finding themselves facing what we call a high ratio of ‘uncertainty to knowledge.’ This is a problem because making decisions based on old assumptions often leads to unfortunate outcomes.”

I love this idea of the uncertainty/knowledge ratio, because it accurately describes a problem that most strategic level executives face today: There isn’t enough information to make accurate, informed decisions – or at least it isn’t easy to gather and analyze it. Mind mapping software can help executives to manage uncertainty by enabling them to visually map out the current challenge, identify missing information and help you to manage your “discovery” process, brainstorm and organize potential solutions, evaluate alternatives based on various criteria, select the best ones for implementation, and develop visually-oriented project plans for each of them. In short, mind mapping software helps to lower the uncertainty/knowledge ratio.

“Human beings have a tendency to embrace information reinforcing their pre-existing beliefs, while challenging or rejecting information that calls these beliefs into question.”

By enabling you to capture, organize and analyze information and knowledge, mind mapping software can help you to challenge your existing assumptions, determine the new realities of the current situation and make better decisions, based on a rigorous analysis of a more complete, balanced body of information and knowledge.

“We favor a “discovery-driven” approach that emphasizes searching for the right answers and reducing the assumption-to-knowledge ratio.”

As I’ve already explained, mind mapping software is invaluable for bringing order and efficiency to the discovery and analysis processes.

“Launching reinvention requires candid assessment of the core’s prospects and goals to orient the organization toward a compelling future.”

How do you envision future scenarios? They are mental “pictures” that envision your organization’s potential future states. As such, they are sometimes difficult to put into words in a meaningful and compelling way. Mind mapping can help, by enabling you to lay out a set of scenarios side by side and compare them.

“Once management acknowledges that the core business is in trouble, the next challenge is to determine which projects, initiatives and other activities can drive the company’s growth ambitions. This often leads to decisions to invest less in enhancing the core business and more in new, rapid-growth segments. The more specific a company can be about which kinds of initiatives will support its future strategy, the more momentum it can create.”

Mind mapping software enables you to visualize trade-offs between a number of growth opportunities, identifying and codifying strengths and weaknesses, and helping you to craft a more accurate future vision for the organization’s long-term sustainability.

“Document and test your fundamental assumptions. As the overall business environment changes and the stability of core businesses becomes less certain, managers need to be willing to take a few steps back and reassess. It could be that things they thought they ‘knew’ about their business are actually assumptions that may or may not still correspond with reality. “

Documenting assumptions can be done easily with mind mapping software. In fact, some strategists believe it’s an ideal tool to bring unseen assumptions to light, so they can be accurately assessed.

• Significant time savings can be realized by utilizing mind maps brainstorming, developing and sharing meeting agendas and notes and task lists.
• Mind maps are great team consensus building tools.
• Project management is improved, because you can assign tasks to different people on the team.
• The mind map provides a good overview of who is overloaded or underloaded on the team, as well as areas where knowledge is lacking.
• It also helps team members to collectively identify and fix problems faster.
• It enables everyone on the team to see the important issues the same way, and to clear up misconceptions that would otherwise delay or cripple the team’s progress on projects.
• Because everyone can view a common big picture view of the project as well as its details, you increase the likelihood that new ideas and connections will occur.

In short, based on the responses to this question, it is clear that mind mapping software provides tremendous value teams, helping them to projects along with great efficiency. Its value extends beyond the obvious applications like group brainstorming and project management into other valuable applications like knowledge management and consensus building/decision-making.

Several people specifically mentioned the fact that everyone is looking at a common picture, which can be easily updated and shared. So can Word documents – but there is something about presenting information in a visual manner that has a great deal of power. In a text document, the underlying structure of the information is typically buried within the sentences and paragraphs. It’s hard to differentiate between background information, essential information, actionable items and ideas. A mind map enables teams to clearly differentiate these elements, and to visualize the structure of their collective knowledge, information and ideas. This enables them to manage it at a much higher level than would otherwise be possible.

Thanks to those of you who contributed your intriguing insights into team mapping. If anyone else has any experiences or insights they like to add, please share them in the comments area below.