It would be great if we could set up some Skypecasts and talk among ourselves about how people are using and maximizing MindManager.

Brian

I do like the idea of communities for products very much, especially for products where there is a lot of potential in learning and in teaching how to use them.

I spent a lot of time in the german Mindjet user-to-user forum in the last years helping people using MindManager and stopped doing that a while ago since that forum would more and more be used as a helpdesk replacement by people that had no licence or were to lazy to use the help.

Since some time now I do some blogging about using MindManager in my own Blog but since it is not well known I do not have many readers (yet).

In parallel I do some person-to-person help with MindManager (and other tools since I help people optimizing their producitivity) but that is relatively time consuming and all the “vocal” information is used only once.

And this month I will try something new (for me). I will do a webcast for Mindjet and that could be a very good thing since that takes care of the reusability issue (with the downside of lack of searchablity, but for that I already have blogged some of the content).

As you can see, I would be a willing contributor. But now to the issues at hand:

The problem with the (already existing) MindManager community is, that it has different meeting places (yahoo-group, 2 forums by Mindjet, Mindjet-Labs, official Blogs, some other forums, a openBC-Group, private Blogs, companies related to Mindjet with own forums and blog as for example MindBusiness …) and as far as I know at least two different main languages (english and german).

And all this meeting points have their disadvantages:

- no RSS support
- no support for posting pictures
- no support for posting maps
- no support for posting videos (since some things are better explained by showing the effects)
- not really searchable
- different to link to
…

The technically best solution I know of (at the moment) is the blog-solution at the Labs since there nearly every need is solvable (I think even the search issue).

Best wishes

Andreas

It seems to me that the biggest thing lacking isn’t the technical capabilities of the actual group.

The most obvious problem with groups so far is the lack of engagement between Mindjet and the communities out there.

There are too many one way conversations being created and little to no dialogue. I went and looked at the relaunched MindjetLabs sight and the top article talked about combining MindMaps with Wiki’s.

The Yahoo community tried to engage Mindjet with this concept last spring and we didn’t have much luck. I know of at least one group now that has been developing this capability ever since and they’ve made some great progress.

If this is going to be a success, then Mindjet must talk with the users, trainers and developers. If that occurrs, it doesn’t really matter where it happens or what technical setup is used. The substance is the dialogue, and the technical features just increase the flow of ideas