MindJet Releases MindManager 8

Today, MindJet has released two new prod­ucts: MindManager 8 for Windows and MindManager Web.

I’ve blogged about MindManager before as it is one of the main tools in my cre­ative arse­nal. If you haven’t tried MindManager before or have been curi­ous about it, now is the best time to try it and dive into mind map­ping. Here’s a few of the main new fea­tures in the new version.

What’s New in MindManager 8

Maps shar­ing: One of the main lim­i­ta­tions of using MindManager before was that it was dif­fi­ult to share those maps with peo­ple who did not have it. Exporting to Word and other for­mats could only go so far and, for me at least, my MindManager maps did not cre­ate good client deliv­er­ables even if they were very use­ful to me internally.

With MindManager 8, we can now export maps directly to PDF with embed­ded inter­ac­tive maps (a Flash movie from the map is embed­ded in the PDF). This is huge for me. We now can share our maps in a self con­tained and secure file for­mat and email them to any­one or make them eas­ily down­load­able from any Web site. Secondly, MindManager 8 also export directly to Flash itself so we can add inter­ac­tive maps to our Web sites. You can check out how that feels by look­ing at the map on the MindManager 8 prod­uct page on MindJet’s Web site.

Integrated Microsoft Office File Editing & Embedded Web Browser: MindManager 8 can now dis­play Web pages or edit MS Office doc­u­ments right from within MindManager’s inter­face. For me this is a very wel­come addi­tion as I often want to add links to Web pages to map top­ics. Now I don’t have to copy paste as there’s an “Add to Map” but­ton right in the embed­ded browser.

Integrated Content & ser­vices: It is now pos­si­ble to add search top­ics, RSS feeds or con­nec­tions to data­bases directly in maps by using what MindJet calls “Map Parts” that con­nect to search engines and other ser­vices or data stores. That way, top­ics in map can be kept fresh and rel­e­vant with updated data instead of being static.

Web ser­vices Map Parts included in MindManager 8 include Google, Yahoo and Windows Live (Search); MySpace and Facebook (social net­work­ing) and Amazon, eBay and StrikeIron D&B (eCom­merce). Database link­ers include Access, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, Excel and text files.

These are just a few of the new fea­tures included in MindManager 8. I will post again on why you would want to use an appli­ca­tion like MindManager but, in the mean­time, you can read my pre­vi­ous posts on mind map­ping from last year when I started using MindManager 7:

• My Search for Mind Mapping Software
• Mind Mapping as a Creative and Project Management Tool
• Another Piece of the Mind Mapping for Project Management Puzzle