Product Reviews
Successful Projects with MindManager
Manuals for brainstorming.
This is another add-on for MindManager, the brainstorming and organization
software I reviewed in Developer Central #3. MindManuals are, as you might
guess, documents designed to help you work with MindManager more effectively.
I took a look at their beginning MindManual, which serves as an introduction
to the MindManager product.
MindManuals are delivered as a combination of HTML Help files and MindManager
Map files. If you download the evaluation version of this package, you
get all of the help and a few of the maps to try out. Registration gives
you the rest of the maps as well as some additional tools for integrating
MindManager with Microsoft PowerPoint.
Topics range from very basic (an introduction to visual thinking, the
principle behind MindManager) to fairly advanced (working with Microsoft
Outlook). One very nice thing is that most of the content here is task-oriented.
That is, rather than learning which buttons do what, the MindManual tackles
topics such as "Managing Meetings" or "Working Collaboratively". If you've
got MindManager and you're a bit unsure what to do with it, these will
help immensely.
Overall the topics here are well-written, and the quality control seems
quite good—I didn't catch any editing mistakes, which is pretty unusual.
Other MindManuals tackle topics such as defining small IT projects and
creating presentations with MindManager.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.