MindManager 8 – Share Everything!

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Sorry to those of you who subscribe to this for Apex content, but this is too good to keep under wraps.  Actually, if you want a good tool for designing, documenting and organizing information for your Apex applications, check out MindManager.  Try out the Free Trial version.

MindJet released their newest and greatest version of MindManager today and I’m pretty impressed.

I’d participated in their beta test and didn’t see much that was new and notable.  But what they actually released is pretty cool.

Share your map with anyone

Want to share your map but your buddy doesn’t have MindManager and has zero interest in downloading the free viewer?  No problem!

Just export the file as a pdf and Adobe Reader will start up the Flash player for your map.  So your friend can browse your map interactively, expanding and contracting the branches, zooming, etc.  I think that’s the slickest thing!

You can also export as an Adobe Flash (SWF) file that can be viewed via a web browser, so you can post it to your blog.

Here’s a small example of an Apex Knowledge Base I started (and never finished) a while back.  Obviously you’ll need the free Adobe Flash player installed in your browser.

They’ve also further integrated their Mindjet Connect tool, which lets you share and edit maps and any Microsoft Office-type document on their servers with your closest friends.  I think their price for this service is out of reach for most, but more power to them.

Your maps on the web!

I haven’t learned much about this (missed much of yesterday’s webinar), but they say you can access your files via their MindManager Web utility.  No clue how that’s different from Mindjet Connect, sorry.

Connect to your Database

Yes, they had very basic access to SQLServer and Oracle, if you wanted to roll your own connection.  I’m much more excited about this, hoping against hope that it will be fairly easy to implement this.  Databases they say they support include:

• Access
• SQLServer
• MySQL
• Oracle
• IBM DB2
• Excel
• Text files (*.txt and *.csv)

Integrating Web Search to your maps

This sounds pretty slick too.  Basically you define a search against your favorite search engine (from their list) and then the results appear in your map.  Refresh them on demand.

I’m really looking forward to digging into this functionality.  Expect more later.