I’ve been spending time re-familiarising myself with the nuances of this tool. I’ve been using it for about six months, and now use it for planning meetings and pretty much any major document. I’m about to start a project that will also benefit from its ability to link with MS Project and Powerpoint, so I’ve been digging into that part of the functionality.
What I love about the project management link is the way the functionality of this tool complements the total left-brain-ness of standard project management tools. The most important part of any project is the first meeting where the people involved get engaged with breaking the scope down into manageable chunks – to be able to do that with a mindmapping tool and then export a first-cut WBS or PBS is just…cool…
I’ve played around a bit with mind-mapping for a number of years and although you can’t beat the flexibility of pen and paper for personal notes, for collaborative work some kind of electronic tool seems essential. (apart from anything else, I lose paper!)
Links to old broken wiki removed
The other idea that’s nagging me tonight is a need for a MMToWiki tool. I’ve slowly started putting some NLP Wiki pages together but I’m finding the flat-file format of a Wiki rather frustrating when writing a set of interlinked documents. I’d love to be able to outline and write the first major tranche of those pages in MindManager, then export to a set of Wiki-formatted text files.
Hmmm… and when, I wonder, is tool-building a displacement activity from the writing? 🙂
[update 2003-02-13] Have found Mind2XML an add-in for MindManager that does “exactly what it says on the tin”. So now the gap in my knowledge that comes into focus is how little I know about XSL
[update 2007–4-11] And almost exactly 4 years after I wrote this post, a very similar idea about the combined use of wiki and mindmaps emerges over at Activityowner.Com – with the big difference that he has actually produced a first draft of a conversion tool…
