MindManager 9: Empowering the Knowledge Worker via Tight MS Office Integration

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 13, 2010 Comments

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Mindjet Releases MindManager 9 With SharePoint integration and Salesforce.com integration tightly under its belt, Mindjet (news, site) announces the next major update to its flagship solution MindManager. And let me just say, this is not your average mindmapping software.

Integration is a Key Ingredient

We already know that Mindjet sees the ability to tightly integrate with well known business systems as a must do.

In February it announced MindManager for SharePoint, helping users visual their SharePoint data across sites and environments.
In March it announced Mindjet Deal Navigator that helps organizations visualize Salesforce.com Data.

MindManager v9 is now tightly integrated with Microsoft technologies including Office 2007 and 2010, SharePoint, Bing Search, Windows Desktop Search, Windows 7 and Windows Mobile. Mindjet claims that MindManager is the "missing" Microsoft application. When you think in terms of productivity, it may well be. Here's why:

Key Features in MindManager 9

When Mindjet thought about what MindManager needed to do, it thought about the top challenges for organizations today. According to Neil Mendelson, VP Product Management and Michael Deutch, Director of Product Marketing with Mindjet, these included:

Information overload
Dis-integrated applications/ lost productivity switching context between applications

So what do you do about these challenges? Well Deutch says you 1) try to accomplish more, faster, 2) implement a better planning tool and 3) communication better with your team. It's these three things that drive the new capabilities in MindManager 9.

Microsoft Outlook Integration

You can now create dynamic queries in MindManager that will connect with Outlook and pull in relevant data for viewing on a dynamic map.

MindManager Outlook Dashboards

You can pull in emails, including attachments, tasks, contacts, notes and calendar items assigning priorities as required.

Planning for Non-Project Manager

Project Managers aren't the only ones who need to manage tasks and create plans. And let's face it, Microsoft Project is a great tool, but it's also a pain in the butt to learn to use when you aren't using it on a regular basis.

MindManager gives you the ability to move your planning out of Excel (where most of us do our planning) and into an environment that gives you more powerful capabilities. Visualize your tasks in a mind map, pull in contacts, assign tasks with people and dates. Pull in Outlook tasks to add to your calendar.

What's nice is that you can then view your plan with a Gantt Chart (instead of working in Project creating the Gantt chart as starting point), make changes in the Gantt chart and have them reflected immediately in the tasks you created. You can also view resource utilization, showing you where you've over or under tasked someone.

MindManager Planning

When you are done, you can still export your plan to Microsoft Project if you like. In addition, if you have a plan started in project, you can import it into MindManager and continue working on it from there.