Lately, Mindjet evangelist Michael Deutch has been doing a lot of experimentation with MindManager 8 (cue the creepy music and diabolical “BWA-HA-HA-HA” laugh), inspired by several posts written by Alan Yoshioka in his Mobile Musings blog. In several recent posts in the Mindjet Blog (which can be found here, here and here), Michael shares his experiences in getting his employer’s mind mapping program to integrate with:
- Gmail, Google’s popular e-mail client
- Google Docs, an online word processing application
- Google Presentations
- Google Spreadsheets
- Basecamp, a web-based project management and collaboration tool
- Remember the Milk, a web-based task management service
Michael’s series of little “mashup” experiments has been surprisingly successful (“It’s ALIVE!!”). Each document in Google’s online apps is addressable via URL, which means you can create hyperlinks to individual documents, spreadsheets and presentations within your mind map. Access to specific Gmail messages is accomplished by way of a Google Tools app that converts e-mails into Google Docs documents. Remember the Milk also works because you can create public (non-editable) task lists using the service, and link to them from within your MindManager map. You can’t link to individual tasks, however.
One advantage of using MindManager 8 with Web 2.0 services like this is its integrated browser window, which allows you to drag and drop links from your browser’s address bar directly onto a topic within your map; also, you can access each of these services in an integrated map/browser view.
All kidding and corny mad scientist jokes aside, thanks, Michael, for investing the time to explore how these tools can potentially work together, and for sharing what you’ve learned with us. We’re “Igor” to learn more!
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