Michael Deutch vertelt wat er nog beter is.
We zijn heel benieuwd naar jullie ervaringen.

Earlier today, Mindjet announced the release of its flagship product, MindManager 2017 for Windows.

We are excited to simultaneously release this new version in English, German and French. The whole team has been extremely busy since unveiling our last version, dedicating their passion and countless hours of care to deliver this major upgrade.

Our journey to MindManager 2017 began by working closely with our users through research, meetings with users at their sites and our offices, and via surveys and online communication.

What became clear from listening to you, our users, was the need to share your work with your colleagues who may not be using MindManager (yet)! You asked for easier ways to share your ideas, plans, and solutions with others while maintaining visual parity with the original map you created.

We listened and we created a new universal file export based on HTML5 which produces an interactive file that can be opened in any modern browser. Reviewers can navigate within the map, open and close branches, access links, attachments and view topic notes and other map data, pan and zoom, search for information and more. This is the most powerful map export that we’ve ever created and we plan to continue to evolve and expand its capabilities.

Also, to support your ability to share MindManager content with anyone, we’ve added a new integration with Box and improved our integration with SharePoint by adding three new authentication methods, so now we support Windows NTLM Authentication, Forms Based Authentication, Office 365 Authentication (new), Azure ADFS/On Premises Authentication (new), and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) which is also new.

We’re also excited to announce a new integration but this isn’t your everyday integration story. MindManager, with our integration into the Zapier platform, is now connected with over 700 different web apps making it the most integrated mapping solution in the world!

Zapier is a third party web application that allows you to automate tasks between MindManager and 700+ web applications and services including Gmail, OneNote, Box, Evernote, Slack, Trello, Jira, Basecamp, and more…

Users send topics from MindManager maps to any of the applications integrated with Zapier. Also, it’s possible to set up Zapier to send content to MindManager from these applications as well. Topics are not synchronized; they are either sent (e.g. exported) or received from other applications. For instance, users can build a project plan in MindManager and send the tasks to dozens of project and task management applications. Or, users can configure Zapier to send content like important emails or links to new documents added into your cloud storage to any of your maps, like a project dashboard map.

 

Another important use of MindManager is to plan and manage projects. Based on your feedback and suggestions, we’ve made several enhancements to help users plan and manage work with less effort and better results.

First, we added a new visualization for Project Managers…a way to not only visualize a project’s critical path within the map and Gantt chart but also the ability to filter on critical tasks. This tool helps managers focus their attention on the tasks that could potentially delay the project if something falls behind schedule.

 

We strongly believe in the power of visualization leveraging images, icons and even topic shapes and colors to differentiate topics allowing you, the user, to add meaning to each of these elements. We believe it’s not just a pretty picture you’re creating but a powerful way to manage your project, plan and ideas. In the MindManager 2017 release, we’ve added a new way to highlight completed tasks and allow you to set task highlighting on with or without applying task roll ups. So any task that you’re tracking can highlight when it is at risk (yellow), late (red) or completed (green). And we believe you should have the power to turn this feature on and set your own preferred colors.

A smaller but useful update is to provide you with the option of wrapping the topic and task information so all the information is displayed within the map. In the past, for instance, when you had multiple resources assigned to a task, the information was cut off and only visible through hovering over the information and using the tool tips. Now you can apply the wrapping option and quickly scan your map with all the details visible.

But that’s not all!

We’ve added more visual layouts, expanding what you can create and present with MindManager.

Maps and concept maps and even our new workflow diagrams introduced last year, help you visualize and answer the questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’…possibly even ‘why’.

 

With the new Timeline layouts, you can answer the question of ‘when’. Now you’ll be able to build out dynamic vertical and horizontal timelines to track and present time-based information. For instance, you can use it to display project timelines highlighting for the team key milestones or communicate your company history visually or your future plans. Personally, I envision using it to illustrate our product and development roadmaps. These new layouts provide the ability to show or hide branch content, add important meta-data like priorities, percent complete, notes, hyperlinks and more. You can quickly filter topics within the timeline or leverage the map index to quickly navigate to relevant topics.

We heard over the course of the year a lot of positive and some critical feedback for our latest visualization we introduced last year, flowcharts and concept maps. We continued to invest in this area, making improvements to help users draw flowcharts with ease. We added a new quick menu for choosing shapes in any direction off of a flow chart topic. Simply hover your mouse over a flow chart topic’s quick-add icon and a shape menu appears for your convenience.

Also, based on the flowchart feedback, we made several enhancements to simplify the number of steps it takes to draw relationships between topics, enabled right angles in relationship lines to make a cleaner appearance within your diagrams, and added a way to insert a new topic between existing topics.

Sometimes we make minor enhancements that have big impacts for our users. In MindManager 2017, we introduce a slight change to topic Tags which might be one of my favorite of these smaller enhancements. Earlier versions of MindManager limited tags to be unique across all a map’s tag groups. In other words, if you added a tag called “High”, it was limited to one tag group within the map, for instance, the group “Risk”. Now, you can add the tag “High” to more than one tag group.

Another exciting visual enhancement is that we’ve added over 700 new topic images which can be easily resized without losing quality. The default size of the images are larger (52×52) in MindManager 2017 and allow you to scale to the maximum resolution of 192×192 without losing image quality. We’ve added new categories too, including Design & Engineering, Science & Medical, Transportation, Food, Holidays, and more. You can still access images from the previous version in the Library under the Legacy category. The MindManager templates library has also been updated to include these new images.

To get started, a free trial for MindManager 2017 is available or you can purchase it now.

If you have upgrade protection, MSA or active subscriptions, you will receive a download link and new license keys via email within the month. You can download a full functioning trial and you’ll receive your key before the trial expires.

Lastly, I’d like to offer a GIANT THANK YOU to everyone who has participated in getting this major new release available. Starting with all of our customers who provided feedback throughout the year to our development teams, product management and design, testing as well as the marketing team, support team and everyone in operations who have helped bring this version to life.

THANK YOU!
Happy Mapping!