MindManager 2012 features an integrated web browser. This isn’t a new feature; it actually debuted with MindManager 2009, the previous version of the program. But Mindjet has significantly enhanced it in the 2012 version, making it possible to conduct the bulk of your research for a report or project within this full-featured mind mapping program.

MindManager 2012 streamlines the process of moving content from the web browser to your mind map. You can now add images, blocks of text and entire web pages to your map in a single click. In addition, you can edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files within the browser pane, without leaving MindManager. That’s pretty cool!

In this new Insider video, I will demonstrate these capabilities to you, and I’ll explain how you can use them to conduct research or gather materials for a report, using a combination of MindManager’s integrated browser and a smart map part.

This link to this report is only visible to members of the Mind Mapping Insider membership program. It contains a wealth of resources that can help you to be more productive, creative and have a greater impact in your job. It’s not enough to have a mind mapping tool – you need the insights to use it in ways that deliver value and enhance your value to your employer and your customers/clients. In this economy, that’s critically important. That’s what this program is all about – enhancing the value that you bring to your work! Click here for more details.

Considering Mindjet’s announcement earlier this year that it planned to increase its focus on mobile applications, this announcement didn’t come as a surprise to me. Several months ago, a reader of this blog asked me if Mindjet was planning to launch a mind mapping app for the Android platform. I answered that I was not aware of such a project, but it would make sense if the company was planning such a move, considering that it was an obvious gap in their mobile product line. I further speculated that, rather than create a new app from scratch, it would probably acquire a developer of an existing Android app, as they did with MyMind to create the Mindjet for iPhone and iPad apps. That’s exactly what happened.

Misleading download statistics?

According to TechCrunch.com, Thinking Space’s Android mapping app has been downloaded more than Mindjet’s apps for the iPad and iPhone combined by more than 3 to 1: “To date, there have been roughly 325,000 downloads of Mindjet’s iPhone and iPad apps. Thinking Space has actually seen more success with its Android app, clocking more than 1.1 million downloads.” These numbers may be misleading, however: The writer at TechCrunch may not realize that Mindjet acquired the technology for its iPhone and iPad mapping apps from MyMind, may have neglected to include their downloads in this total.

In addition to the growing number of Android-based smartphones, Mindjet for Android will also work on the many inexpensive tablets that utilize this open-source operating system – an area of significant growth. According to Mindjet’s new product page for this app, it will work on any device running Android OS 2.1 or later. As with the new iPhone and iPad apps, Mindjet for Android supports MindManager’s native .MMAP file type as well as round-trip editing – which means that map attributes created in MindManager are preserved after editing in the mobile app.

Unique features

Based on a view of Mindjet’s overview video for its latest product addition, several features of Mindjet for Android stand out that aren’t offered on their iPhone and iPad apps:

• Gestures enable you to access common features quickly. This should be a real productivity plus when you’re creating mind maps on an Android device.
• Text tags are keyword searches that you can set up in the app’s file view. They appear as tabs across the top of the file list, and enable you to quickly locate mind maps that contain those words. Nice!

Here’s the video:

What’s next for Mindjet for Android?

Presumably, Mindjet will add support for its Connect workspace product in the coming months. It will also be interesting to see how this app evolves in the coming months, as the former Thinking Space app gets further integrated into Mindjet’s longer-term product road map. Perhaps there will be a rationalization of app features between the Apple iOS and Android platforms over time, so all of Mindjet’s mobile apps will work the same. For example, Mindjet for Android could adapt the clever pop-up “pie menu” that it inherited from MyMind, and is currently used on the Mindjet for iPhone and iPad apps. That would make sense. Otherwise, Mindjet must promote two completely different sets of features for the two platforms.

Mindjet for Android is a free download from the Android Market.

I’ve always been a fan of theRealizer, a brainstorming plug-in for MindManager (read my review of it from 2008 here). So when I learned that Mindjet integrated this terrific process-driven brainstorming tool into MindManager 2012, I was very excited. So I asked Michael Deutch at Mindjet to give me a deeper dive into how they expanded and improved it. Much has changed, which is why we’re going to take a closer look at it.

Deutch emphasized that Mindjet’s development team worked closely with the Realize AB, the Swedish company who developed theRealizer. This company specializes in doing facilitated brainstorming sessions, and Mindjet wanted to be sure to leverage their expertise to make this the best possible ideation tool for business users.

This brainstorming tool consists of three stages:

1. Define challenge

It’s been said that a problem clearly defined is already half solved. Accordingly, the challenge phase of this brainstorming tool helps you to accurately define the problem or challenge for which you want to brainstorm ideas. The program ships with a set of over 60 predefined challenge statements, categorized into product development, marketing, sales, organization and individual categories. theRealizer add-in only contained nine challenge cards, so this is a major expansion.

Adding a challenge to your mind map is simple: Select one statement and click the “add to map” button. The idea here is that once you’ve added your challenge statement to the map, you then add topics and sub-topics to it where you explore how to address your challenge. Sometimes, this deep exploration of your challenge can reveal a deeper problem that you didn’t realize existed. Perhaps you were trying to solve the wrong problem. Or it may lead to some useful ideas, even before you get to the actual brainstorming stage.

If you want to modify the wording of an existing challenge statement or add your own to the set that MindManager 2012′s brainstorming tool displays each time you use it, you simply click on the “edit” button. The challenge list becomes editable text, and you can delete, add, modify or regroup challenges with complete freedom.

If you want to create your own challenge, a separate “custom challenge” tab gives you fields to enter your own challenge statement and some notes about it. The note becomes a topic note attached to your challenge topic, as you would expect.

The challenges section of this brainstorming tool also contains a visual element: Over 600 challenge cards, which look something like cards you’d expect to find in a deck of playing cards. Each challenge card contains an image and a statement – such as “Describe a picture of success. What do you need to get there?” with a picture of a set of legs and feet standing in first place on the winner’s stand after an athletic event. Clicking on an information button below the card “flips” it over and displays a suggestion on how to utilize its message. Cards can also be designated as favorites by clicking on a star icon. Once you’ve selected one or more cards as favorites, a separate set of navigation arrows appears on screen, enabling you to browse only your favorite challenge cards.

One neat enhancement that Mindjet made for MindManager 2012 was to enable users to increase the size of the challenge cards on screen. The cards can be opened in a separate window, which displays them at roughly twice the normal size. This is useful for anyone who is facilitating a group brainstorming session or web-based meeting, so that their text can be clearly viewed on screen.

2. Generate ideas

When they adapted theRealizer to MindManager 2012, the developers at Mindjet modified the idea entry form to enable quick entry. When you click on the “enter ideas” button, a dialog box pops up, where you can quickly type your ideas, hit the enter key and immediately type your next idea. I tried it, and it was very fast! This is ideal for group brainstorming sessions, where ideas are often flying fast, and you need to be able to record them just as quickly.

This stage of the brainstorming process contains three types of cards:

Questions: These cards are based on SCAMPER, a brainstorming technique that asks you to perform different actions on your idea – for example, minimize it, put it to other uses or rearrange its parts. SCAMPER is one of the world’s best known and most proven brainstorming techniques, so it’s good to see it here.

Images: Image cards contain a question and an image. They appeal to a different part of the brain, and encourage users to engage in out of the box thinking.

Words: Word cards, as their name implies, contain a single word. They function as random thinking prompts, and should lead your creative problem solving efforts in new directions. MindManager 2012 contains 500 word-based idea cards, substantially more than theRealizer did.

Idea cards follow a similar format to the challenge cards, with the ability to display them in a larger format in a separate window and to designate cards as favorites and then navigate them easily. theRealizer enabled users of this plug-in to edit these cards, but Mindjet decided to eliminate this feature to keep things easier for users.

3. Categorize and refine

By the time you reach this stage, your mind map should now be full of ideas. Your next step is to organize and improve them. MindManager 2012 enables you to create 4 types of branches to categorize your ideas: Do it!, Investigate, Save, Trash. The idea behind this scheme is that you add these smart topics to your map and then drag and drop the ideas you’ve generated to them.
MindManager 2012′s brainstorming tool also contains four different tools for further refining and classifying ideas:

• Idea refinement terms
• Opportunities
• SWOT analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats)
• Time management

Selecting one of these evaluation tools adds all of its associated keywords to your mind map as a group. An edit button opens up a dialog box that enables you to modify the five existing idea improvement methods or add your own. This could be very useful if your firm has a standard procedure or set of criteria-based screens for evaluating ideas. You could include them in this toolset, or eliminate the pre-installed ones and just present your organization’s proprietary method.

Conclusion

Mindjet has made impressive improvements to this brainstorming tool, and has integrated it tightly into MindManager 2012. In the past, a lot of people made claims that mind mapping was an excellent creative tool. Now that’s true in spades, thanks to this refined and expanded toolset in the latest version of MindManager.

Why have I spent so much time analyzing this brainstorming tool? Because creative ideas are more important than ever today. There are many brainstorming tools and techniques available to you today, but most of them only do one thing – serve as a catalyst to help you generate ideas. What I like about this tool is the fact that it wraps an entire process around the act of brainstorming – from clearly defining your challenge to refining and evaluating your ideas, so you can quickly identify the best ones for implementation (and which then can be managed as projects within the same software program!).

What do Smart Map Parts, Spinscape and the SharePoint version of MindManager have in common? They are all attempts to use mind maps as a research tool, connecting mind mapping software with data stores wherever they are – whether that data is on your corporate network, Google or your personal Evernote database – searching them and manipulating the resulting data within a visual map format.

The “information scalpel”

I predict that these tools will become more powerful and more flexible over time, an “information scalpel” that will enable sophisticated searching of information stores and flexible manipulation of the results. Some possibilities include:

• Boolean searches (search for A and B but not C),
• Limiting searches say to a specific kind of data, such as news or blogs,
• Searching other online stores of information, such as Wikipedia, Google+, Wolfram Alpha and industrial directories
• Connections to other types of corporate databases, in addition to SharePoint
• A Smart Map Part builder, so you can easily construct and modify tools to search those information stores that are most important in your industry or profession
• Storing and auto-updating search results on a scheduled basis, which would be useful for topic monitoring and competitive analysis
• Auto-notification when search results are located that meet certain criteria
• Tagging specific topics and search results and forwarding them to others on your work team for action

In addition, the ability to review search results and only add certain entries to your mind map is a capability that will become more important in the near future. Currently, Mindjet’s Smart Map Parts for Mind Manager deliver all search results into your mind map. It’s up to you to delete those that aren’t relevant to your needs. A better approach would be to conduct searches and load the results into a side panel or dialog box near the work space, where the user can decide which results are relevant and worthy of being added to your map. This is the approach taken by Spinscape, a web-based mind mapping application, and I think it makes a lot of sense. This kind of functionality will becoming increasingly important, as information managers continue to struggle with information overload.

The integrated browser with the ability to drag and drop web content also helps to transform mind mapping software into a powerful research tool. It enables you to search for information of interest and selectively add the most important bits and pieces to your mind map in an organized and efficient way.

What inspired me

What got me thinking about this is Radian6, a sophisticated team-based social media monitoring and campaign development tool that enables multiple people to track what’s being said about your company and its competitors, to monitor the needs that are being expressed by current and prospective customers and to take action. This powerful toolset is an information dashboard on steroids. As I looked at what Radian6 can do for organizations, I got to wondering what it would look like within a mind map environment.

Salesforce.com recently acquired Radian6. I think in the future we can expect to see some integration between MindManager and this powerful social media toolset, because Mindjet already has a smart map connector called Deal Navigator for the popular online CRM application.

That’s what I see in my crystal ball. What do you think the future of mind mapping software looks like?

Mindjet Connect

Mindjet Connect, announced earlier this week and available for the end of September, bears some resemblance to the developers existing Catalyst online document sharing and workspace application, including a web-based version of MindManager.

The biggest change with Connect, however, is expanded sharing: You can now invite an unlimited number of guests to collaborate on a mind map on an ad hoc basis, regardless of whether or not they have a Connect account. This will be a fully-functioning version of Connect and MindManager Web, not a “crippled” version for free users. In addition, a basic Connect account will be free. A business version will also be offered with more online storage space.

Also new is that new versions of the company’s mobile mapping solutions – its apps for iPad and iPhone – will be Connect enabled, so that users of these apps will be able to check out mind maps, edit them and then check them back in. In addition, these apps are now free, to encourage greater use. In the first 2 days after Mindjet’s mobile apps were changed to free apps, they were downloaded over 150,000 times.

Mindjet’s goal with this new direction is to open up mind mapping to an expanded universe of potential users, and to remove any potential barriers to adoption of its visual thinking solutions. “We want to focus on enabling communication and sharing, rather than ‘buy now,’” explains Mindjet CEO Scott Raskin.

MindManager Web will soon be enhanced with a rich web API, which will enable it to integrate with Google, Bing, Twitter, Linkedin and Evernote, which will enhance the value of this web-based mind mapping tool for information gathering and research. Users will be able to search these web services from within MindManager Web, and then pull data from them into their mind maps.

A basic Mindjet Connect account will be free; a business account will run you only US$15 per month and provides additional online storage. For existing customers of Mindjet Catalyst, the software developer has already announced on its blog that it will offer a migration plan to Connect later this year.

CoHuman acquisition

CoHuman is a provider of social task management. it’s a web-based application that enables teams to share information about projects and tasks and to share task assignments and status updates, in a familiar Twitter-like “stream.” You can assign people to tasks, follow people and tasks, obtain task status, and streamline project communication. Streams can be filtered and viewed in a number of flexible ways. The acquisition of CoHuman addresses the need to have a holistic view of all of your projects, without having to open multiple mind maps.

Initially, CoHuman will be run as a companion to Connect, but later this year, it will be fully integrated with Connect. Mindjet’s plan is to enable its mind mapping clients and CoHuman with two-way live communication, so that you can “push” task updates from MindManager to your CoHuman account and vice versa.

In this blog, we’ve talked from time to time about the Great Divide of mind mapping: Those people who are more left-brained and creative instinctively “get” it and love thinking in a non-linear fashion. But there’s another large group of pragmatic, linear, right-brained thinkers who view mind mapping is frivolous, not as a serious business tool. I asked the Mindjet team if the integration between MindManager, Connect and CoHuman will help to bridge this gap? The response was “definitely.”

What does this mean? Managers who prefer to view project and task information in a more tabular, linear format will feel right at home in CoHuman, and will still be able to manage project communication, without touching a mind map. Those who do feel comfortable with mind maps will work within MindManager. The project and task data will flow seamlessly between the two formerly disparate worlds.

Mindjet Connect and CoHuman will be available starting on September 22nd. The new versions of the Mindjet iPad and iPhone apps have already been released and are available via the Apple AppStore.

Conclusion

I applaud Mindjet’s change in direction – that is, offering Connect accounts, its mobile apps and access to collaborative map editing for free. This should open up the opportunity for many more people to experience and learn about the benefits of visual mapping and collaboration. The CoHuman acquisition is also very significant, because it bridges some important gaps in small team project communications, and lets people view data in a format that works best for them.

I can’t wait to see how this all comes together and evolves over the next few years. It will definitely be very interesting!

According to this announcement, MindManager 2012 will have an integrated brainstorming tool that will enable you to generate, evaluate and take action on your ideas. Cool! Based on the description of the brainstorming process, it sounds like Mindjet may have partnered with RealizeAB to license their Realizer plug-in for MindManager and VisualMind (click here to read my review of theRealizer 2).

This has been part of Mindjet’s strategy during the past few years – to acquire or license technology from their partners and make them part of the core product. Recent examples include JCVGantt, which is now part of MindManager 9, and Mindjet’s licensing of the iPad app MyMind as the basis for its new Mindjet iPad and iPhone apps. This may be a superior approach for both Mindjet and its partners. My gut feeling is that only a relative minority of MindManager users have ever purchased any plug-ins – which means developers can’t afford to create new versions and you end up with a stagnant plug-in community. Better to integrate the best of them into the core product, where all customers can benefit from them. That seems to be the thinking.

In any case, brainstorming will be a welcome addition to MindManager 2012. It should help to transform what is already an excellent tool for capturing, distilling and organizing information into one that is also adept at generating new insights and ideas!

What’s new in MindManager 9 for Mac

Quick entry mode: This new feature is a new dialog box where you can quickly enter a succession of ideas, using only the keyboard. They appear in a list below the text entry field. At any time, you can drag them from the list and drop them onto any open mind map. This looks like it would be useful in MindManager 9 for Windows, too!

A presentation view that supports the creation of slides, much like the Windows version of MindManager 9. As with the Windows version, you can edit and annotate slides during a presentation. The Mac version of MindManager 9 also has one presentation feature that’s unique to this platform – the ability to jump to any slide in your presentation.

Improved exporting: For some reason, previous versions of MindManager utilized a cloud-based service to handle conversions from the native MindManager file type to Microsoft Office Mac 2011 and iWork applications. Version 9 handles all exports from within the program, a major improvement. MindManager 9 for Mac can now export to Microsoft Word, iWork Pages, Keynote and other formats.

Improved filtering: MindManager 9 for Mac is now equipped with the same multi-level filtering tool as the Windows version, which is especially valuable when working with large, complex mind maps.

User interface improvements: The toolbar of the program has been improved for better usability, and is now customizable. Inspectors have been improved and optimized, and you can now have multiple inspectors open at the same time. In addition, MindManager 9 for Mac adds an in-context formatting bar, which should improve your productivity when formatting map topics.

Support for Catalyst: Previous versions of MindManager for Mac were not designed to integrate with Mindjet’s Catalyst online workspace product for teams. This capability isn’t in this new version of MindManager Mac – at least not yet. Mindjet says it will release a version 9.1 shortly that will add this capability.

Mindjet emphasized during a recent press briefing that it has hired a new Chief Products Officer (CPO), Blaine Mathieu, who is part of a renewed commitment to listening to the needs of its customers. Among other things, Mathieu will be responsible for developing Mindjet’s cross-platform strategy (how it develops visual mapping solutions for all computing platforms). Hopefully, this will mean that MindManager for Mac will remain more on par with the Windows version in the years ahead.

MindManager 9 for Mac will be available on June 23, 2011.

New product: MindManager Mobile

Along with the launch of MindManager 9 for Mac, Mindjet also announced a new product: Mindjet Mobile for iPhone and iPad. It’s based on technology recently acquired from MyMind (see my review of this impressive app here), one of the most impressive mind mapping apps available today. Mindjet hired the developer, and plans to invest aggressively in developing mobile applications, according to a company representative.

Here’s what’s most notable about this app:

Round-trip compatibility: If you have ever tried to move a mind map or other file from one software program to another, then you may have experienced this: Things get lost in translation, corrupted or just flat out don’t work any more. Thankfully, the developers at Mindjet made round-trip compatibility between the new mobile app and the desktop version of MindManager a major priority. You can now move a complex mind map from the desktop to the mobile app and back, with no loss of data. If a capability isn’t supported on the mobile app, it simply goes dormant – it isn’t thrown away. Considering how important it is for people to move their maps seamlessly between their desktop computer and their mobile devices, this is a big plus!

Finger slide topic creation: As in MyMind, the new Mindjet Mobile supports finger slide topic creation. In other words, if you slide your finger from an existing topic in a specific direction, a new linked topic will be created in that direction. This makes it possible to build up new mind maps very quickly. Here’s how I described this elegant functionality in my review of MyMind, the predecessor of Mindjet Mobile:

“When you tap and hold on a topic in your mind map, a set of orange arrows pops up – to the sides and at 45 degree angles to add child topics, and vertical arrows to add sibling topics. Simply drag your finger over the arrow that points in the direction where you want to create a new topic, and an add topic dialog box pops up where you can type in the name of your topic. I tried this on my iPhone, and was very pleased at how intuitive this arrangement feels when creating a mind map.”

In-context editing: Another unique MyMind feature that has been retained in its successor is in-context editing. To edit a topic, you double-tap on it. The menu that pops up looks like a blue circular pie chart, with appropriate icons for the functions you can perform (copy, cut, paste and delete, for example).

Dropbox integration: Dropbox has become a de facto standard for storing files from mobile devices “in the cloud,” or utilizing it as an online backup for your mind maps. I’m pleased to see that Mindjet Mobile supports this.

Separate apps for the iPhone and iPad are available now on the Apple AppStore, priced at US$6.99 and $8.99, respectively, after June 15, 2011. Your Apple mobile device must be running iOS 4.0 or later to run these apps.

• Moving mind maps between the iPhone and desktop mind mapping software
• Do tablet-based mind mapping applications support handwriting recognition?
• Fitting mind mapping into your daily productivity workflow
• Tinderbox for the Mac
• MindManager vs. iMindMap – which is best?
• Getting high school students to use mind mapping software for class writing projects

Mind Mapping Insider members can access this audio file using the link below:

If you cannot see the link, you need to become a member of the Mind Mapping Insider membership group. It’s inexpensive – about the price of a few large cups of premium coffee per month! Click here to learn how.

Please be sure to send me your questions for the June coaching call. You can use the contact form on this blog to submit them or send them to me via Twitter.

Underlying philosophy

Like most mind mapping programs, MindManager has suffered from “feature bloat” during the past few years. In other words, software developers keep adding new features, well beyond what the typical business person will ever use. The result is overly complex, hard-to-use software that can be daunting for new users. In developing the product plan for MindManager 9, the Mindjet team decided to focus on usability and “use cases” – in other words, they observed their customers using the software, watched for areas where they were struggling and strived to learn why, so they could improve the product to make their life easier.

What’s especially smart about this focus is that Mindjet didn’t just conduct research with experienced users, they also had newbies sit down with the program, to see how quickly they could figure out basic tasks, and where they got stuck or confused. They realized that the real power isn’t in “preaching to the converted.” Rather, it comes from attracting new people to mind mapping and MindManager.

What’s new in MindManager 9?

Key priorities for this release of MindManager included helping users to get work done faster, to help users to do basic project planning and execution (designed around “the rest of us,” not professional project managers) and to help users to communicate their ideas more effectively.

Here’s a summary of what’s new in MindManager 9, and why it’s important to you as a business user of mind mapping software:

Dynamic Outlook dashboard: One of the most important features of MindManager, in my estimation, has been its integration with Outlook. An increasing amount of knowledge is embedded in e-mail messages, making it critical to have a way to efficiently move these ideas into mind maps. Starting with MindManager 7, it became possible to select a message in Outlook and send it to the MindManager map you’re working in. Last year, I told you how I used MindManager and Outlook to efficiently prepare a very complex e-newsletter. One limitation was that I had to keep switching back and forth between the two programs to move individual e-mails into my mind maps.

I’m happy to say that Mindjet has taken Outlook integration to a much deeper level in MindManager 9. In short, you can query Outlook 2010 for e-mail messages, tasks, appointments and notes and pull this data into your mind map – without leaving MindManager. That’s very powerful.

MindManager 9 includes a pre-set collection of Outlook queries, or you can create your own. Outlook contacts can be easily added to your mind maps. One major advantage of this is that the person’s e-mail address becomes a separate sub-branch, with a “mailto” link for their e-mail address. If you want to send them an e-mail, you simply click on that link icon and a new Outlook mail form opens, pre-addressed to that person. This eliminates several steps (switch to Outlook, click on the new message toolbar button, look up the person in your address book, etc.). When you’re importing tasks, MindManager incorporates start and end dates into your mind map, and retains Outlook’s color coding.

Sharepoint integration: Currently handled in a special MindManager for Sharepoint version, this will be offered as an optional add-in to MindManager 9. It enables you to set up sophisticated queries to search for and gather data from multiple Sharepoint sites within an organization, making it the perfect tool to tap the potential of the knowledge stored within these corporate silos.

Improved project planning: In MindManager 9, Mindjet has integrated the functionality from the project planning add-in it acquired last year, JCV Gantt, into the core product. This is reflected in a new Gantt view, which is auto-generated from the tasks in your mind map. Significantly, MindManager 9 looks at the estimated number of hours each task will take to complete and other factors to calculate whether or not each person on your team is over- or under-utilized. Nice! Despite the fact that Mindjet has integrated two programs into one, the price of MindManager 9 will be the same as that of version 8. Same price, more value.

Enhanced presentation mode: For years, the presentation mode of MindManager has consisted of a stripped-down screen with map navigation controls at the bottom, which enabled you to walk through the content of your mind map, branch by branch. This was one area where users said they wanted more control over what appeared on screen. Many mind maps contain a combination of presentable information and background or proprietary content that you don’t want to share.

While conducting its research, the Mindjet team came to the realization that most presentations aren’t done at a podium with a large audience. The more typical usage scenario is a small group sitting around a conference table, planning their next project – a much more informal, interactive setting. So they sought to address these needs in MindManager 9′s presentation mode.

Mindjet redesigned the presentation mode of MindManager 9 around a slide show model. To use it, you simply click on a topic to select it and right-click to access the “make slide from branch” command. You can also select topics using a drop-down list in a new “slides” toolbar button in the program’s View menu. The selected topic and all of its subtopics appear as a slide in a vertical pane on the left side of the screen. Within it, you can drag and drop slides to change their order (click on the image above to see a larger version).

Mindjet purposely redesigned the presentation view in version 9 to behave just like PowerPoint, a program that most business people are very familiar with. In fact, MindManager 9′s overall look and feel is meant to make users feel like it is an extension of Office 2010 – almost as if it is the visual mapping program that Microsoft forgot to include in the Office suite. I think this makes a lot of sense. Why? When you’re trying to get people to try something new like mind mapping, it helps to frame it in terms of something else they’re already familiar with, such as the two-paned PowerPoint interface.

When you’re ready to make your presentation, you simply click a “slide show” button, and MindManager 9 shows the familiar Presentation View – only now, instead of displaying your mind map with all of the topics collapsed, it shows your slides, one at a time. You can easily annotate your map and add notes in the presentation view, which makes it ideal for small group presentations like the one I outlined earlier. It should also help in reducing “map shock” in non-mind mapping users, because they will see only a part of the presenter’s mind map at one time, not the overwhelming whole.

Mindjet isn’t the first to use this model for making presentations from mind maps, but I believe it’s the right approach. It’s much easier for new users to understand than the old way, and it gives you a fine level of control over the map content you show in your presentation, which many users will appreciate.

WYSIWYG printing: The lack of flexibility in printing your mind maps has been a complaint of MindManager users for many years. Mindjet addressed these concerns in MindManager 9. But the way they went about it is very clever: You can now use the slides you create in presentation view to designate the sections of your map you want to print. Neat!

Performance improvements: MindManager 9 was significantly rewritten to improve its load time when you first start it up. It also uses Windows system resources more efficiently than its predecessors. MindManager 8 was notorious for using a significant amount of memory when it was open, even if you weren’t editing a mind map. This effectively ran down the batteries of many a laptop. This problem is solved in version 9; it also promises to handle large, complex maps better than its predecessor.

Redesigned ribbon toolbar: Mindjet has made a significant investment in usability testing to make the program easier to use. This is reflected in MindManager 9′s revised ribbon toolbar, which features improved groupings of commands based upon how people really use the program. To make it easier for first-time users, Mindjet grouped its more advanced features under a new “extras” tab. Within this section of the toolbar, you can access Catalyst workspaces, conduct web conferences and do brainstorming.

Conclusion

Based upon what I’ve seen so far, MindManager 9 looks like a must-have release. The tighter Outlook integration, improved presentation mode and enhanced printing capabilities make it worth upgrading from earlier versions of MindManager to version 9. MindManager 9 is the most improved version of this mind mapping program – ever.

For people who have never used mind mapping software before, MindManager 9 promises to be the easiest version of this program to use, ever. For corporate IT departments that can’t quite understand why they should deploy a visual mapping tool like MindManager, the Sharepoint integration is the coup de grace.

Mindjet says MindManager 9 for Windows will be released around August 10th.

File conversions: Catalyst makes it easy to convert your favorite Mindjet maps to Word, PowerPoint, Pages and Keynote files; you can also convert Word and Pages documents to mind maps. I tried a Mindjet to PowerPoint conversion with one of the mind maps I had stored in my Catalyst workspace, and it worked flawlessly. You use a File/Convert command to invoke this. You first get to select the file type. Next, a dialog box pops up with options that are specific to that file type. For PowerPoint, for example, Catalyst gives you an opportunity to give your presentation a file name, control how many topic levels it should convert, a checkbox to use topic notes and speaker notes, show or hide topic callouts and a number of slide formatting options. The conversion was completed almost instantly; a new PPTX file appeared in the list of documents in my Catalyst workspace and I was able to open it with PowerPoint, just as if the file was local on my PC.

I also tried a mind map to Word conversion. In this case, Catalyst gives you the ability to name your document, decide which map items (icon markers, topic notes, callouts, text markers and review comments) should be exported. You can also export task details, such as start and due dates, priority, resources and percentage complete. Finally, the last section of the dialog box lets you decide what to do with links and attachments. You can actually customize the labels applied to these assets. For example, a hyperlink by default is notated with “see also,” but you can easily change that wording to whatever makes the most sense to you. Likewise, attachments get the prefix “see attachment” or you can edit that to suit your tastes. This document was created with very professional-looking formatting, including a nice-looking table of contents. Map markers and task data is presented nicely as well. Very impressive!

Improvements to web conferencing: Catalyst web conferencing now includes support for up to 25 simultaneous participants in a meeting. In addition, you no longer need to download any software to join a Catalyst conference; it’s all handled completely using your computer’s native Flash capabilities. For people working within corporate networks where downloads to the desktop are severely restricted, this should be welcome news!

Faster switching between maps and workspaces: The developers at Mindjet have made it faster and easier to move from one map and workspace to another, with minimal lag time. I tried switching back and forth between several maps; the transitions between the maps and the list of files in my workspace happened very quickly, and maps opened within a second or two. I almost felt like I was working on a desktop program, not a sophisticated web application hosted “in the cloud.”

Simplified file copying: The developers have made it easier to copy a topic or topics from one map and paste them into another. This makes it easier to re-use assets or to start new maps based upon an existing one. I grabbed one branch of an existing map in Catalyst, right-clicked and selected the copy command. Then I opened a new map and used the Ctrl-V (paste) command to attach that topic and its subtopics to the central topic of my new map. Again, the experience of performing this task was very much like working on a desktop program.

Improved drag and drop: You can now drag and drop map markers onto maps created in Catalyst.

Image editing: You can now easily resize embedded images within your mind maps. When you insert an image into a topic, it now has a bounding box around it, with drag handles at the corners. You simply drag and drop the image to the size you want to make it. Very simple.

For more information on the new and improved capabilities of Mindjet Catalyst, why not login and check it out for yourself. Or view this what’s new PDF document.