On the heels of its announcement of the desktop version of MindManager 2017 three months ago, Corel announced a series of major improvements to MindManager Enterprise 2017. It includes a significant expansion of its HTML 5 map viewer, tighter integration with Sharepoint and the return of Map Parts.
HTML5 interactive map export
In the most recent iteration of MindManager, Corel did away with the old, often troublesome Flash-based map viewer in favor of one that is based on the web-standards driven HTML 5 technology. The result is a viewer that displays mind maps that are much truer to the original.
In October, when Corel announced this new “engine” for the map viewer, its capabilities were fairly rudimentary. The latest version of it can display:
- Topics that link to other topics with relationship lines
- Horizontal and vertical timeline map layouts
- Relationship Style: Right angle relationship style
- Topic styles are now supported, too (topic shape, color, font size, etc.).
- Topic Links: Link one topic to another topic
- EMF and WMF images in maps are converted to PNG formats to display properly within the export
Although these improvements to the HTML 5 map viewer are being released at the same time as a new version of MindManager Enterprise, it’s actually being rolled out across the entire MindManager product line.
MindManager improves SharePoint integration
SharePoint 2013 and 2016 users can now open and view mind maps that look nearly identical to maps created in either the Windows or Mac desktop apps. For a list of all of the elements that can now be displayed in the map viewer within SharePoint, click here. The new version of the MindManager Server App for SharePoint presents maps as read-only. Users can still edit maps using MindManager Enterprise.
MindManager Enterprise 2017 adds four new ways to authenticate with SharePoint, including Office 365 Authentication, Azure ADFS/On Premises Authentication and MFA Authentication – in addition to Windows NTLM Authentication and Forms Based Authentication.
Now, in addition to task name, priority, progress, resources, start date and end date, users can synchronize “categories” between tasks in MindManager and their counterparts in SharePoint. Make a change in one application and the other application will get updated automatically. It’s also easier to create task plans in MindManager or reassign tasks by downloading resources from a SharePoint site for task assignments within MindManager.
Continued improvements to project scheduling
Befitting its role as an enterprise productivity tool, MindManager Enterprise 2017 gets a set of advanced project management features that are exclusive to this version, including:
- An enhanced and customizable Gantt chart that opens in a separate window
- The ability to optimize your project schedule, remove slack, and move the schedule to a new start date or to have it complete on a specific date
- Visualize overbooked resources in a new resource chart
- An option to visualize today’s date, highlight weekends and non-working days, and quickly navigate to today, the beginning or end of any project
- New project reporting capabilities
Conclusion
Often, when a company acquires a product, it enters a period of stasis while the acquiring firm launches an in-depth analysis of what they purchased, and develops a product road map for future update. That doesn’t seem to be the case with MindManager and Corel. If anything, product manager Michael Deutch has accelerated the development of MindManager under its wings to advance the state of enterprise mind mapping.
For more detailed information about MindManager Enterprise 2017, please visit the program’s page on the Mindjet website or download a PDF datasheet.
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