Serving Up Web Services in MindManager 8

Part 5 of 8 in the blog series, ‘What’s Great in MindManager 8’!

Since I live and breathe in MindManager, I’m excited to share a little about our new Web Services map part.

What are Web Services?
I’ll try to answer that by showing you. First, take any of your maps and select a topic.

Now, go to your MindManager 8 map parts, open your web services folder to click on the ‘Google’ web service.  A dialog window will appear to ask you how many search results you’d like to see. I selected 5.

MindManager persforms your search and the results now appear in your map. Hover over the notes icon to get a quick idea of the content contained in each link or click the links to view the results in the new integrated web browser.

According to Wikipedia, Web Services is defined as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". Hopefully, seeing it work is easier to understand than the definition itself.

Web Services included in MindManager 8:

• Search: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Live
• E-Commerce: Amazon, Ebay & StrkeIron
• Social Networks: Facebook & MySpace

Mindjet will be releasing information soon on how to add your own services to connect to even more information on the web. For now, here are some of the ways that I plan to use these services:

• Research (created nested web searches and quickly review web content on any subject)
• Brainstorming (use Google to trigger new ideas off of keywords)
• Note-taking
• Writing
• Preparing presentations

If you’re new to MindManager, here are some more great map parts to speed up your mapping!

• Branch Templates: If you typically find yourself following a process and repeating content across maps, this handy feature may save you a lot of time and keep your work consistent. Branch templates let you copy & reuse sections of a map in other maps. Place your cursor on the parent topic that starts the branch you want to reuse, open the Map Parts task pane,  pick a folder to store your template and click "Add Selected Topic(s)".
• File Explorer: This map part is great for building information & project dashboards. While adding it to your map, provide it with a location on your desktop and MindManager will automatically create topics for all your files and folders. It also refreshes to keep your dashboard map always up-to-date, providing easy access to your files while working on projects. And with the new Microsoft File Editing, you can link and update these files in context of your map, keeping the big picture in view at all times.
• Microsoft Linkers: There are also some quick and easy ways to add Microsoft Excel ranges directly into your map as topics as well as new topics that create appointments, contacts, notes or tasks in Outlook.
• News Feeds: Right-clicking in the Map Parts folders exposes the abilty to add an RSS news feed map part. This adds a dynamic RSS topic into your map so you can keep track of the latest and greatest news, right in your map. This can come in handy for research. And with the new integrated web browser, you can read the articles right in MindManager, adding key notes or quotes directly into your map.

Check out the previous posts in this series:

Post 1: What’s Great in MindManager 8: Introducing the Mindjet Player

Post 2: Tackling Tough Tasks: MindManager 8′s Top Task Management Enhancements

Post 3: Context Matters: Edit Office Files Within MindManager Maps

Post 4: Browsing Within Your MindManager Maps