Mindjet takes visual mapping and collaboration to the next level with slick Catalyst platform Comments

Carb

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:51:31 +0000

I belive Mindjet is confussed and lost in some manner with catalyst. The collaboration is great but it should be just a plus. Catalyst and collaboration are much better covered by many other big vendors at much better pricing levels: Webex, Cisco, Adobe, Microsoft, etc. Mind Mapping or Visual Thinking applications are just in the beginning phases. New Management at Mindjet does not really understand the market and the possibilities. Real time collaboration is a plus, not the main income generator as Mindjet thinks will be. Mindjet needs to think in maps using is own product to develop really creative and deep thinking. Catalyst is in my opinion interesting but not a real option for businesses specially very expensive just to try. Will a company spend thousands of US$ to move its projects to catalyst? Not many as sales figures are showing.

Bernardo

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 00:40:17 +0000

My MindManager trial expires in 3 days. I have been using MindManager daily for 27 days now. I love it. And I haven't started playing with Outlook integration yet!

But I am not buying it. It is bloated. It is slow. My hard drive is constantly active when it is running, and the CPU usage stays around 15% when it is idle. Completely idle. I wonder why - I am not touching the mouse, or the keyboard, I am staring at the screen for 15 minutes in disbelief and there he is, MindManager doing GOD KNOWS WHAT.

Great software. Very poorly built. I really really wanted to buy it. But I'm downloading XMind. Mindjet, please get in touch when you fix this, because from what I read on the web, this has been an issue since 2006!

Michael Deutch

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:56:17 +0000

JimB, we're working on ways to leverage our development across platforms so incremental (and exponential) improvements will be seen across the Mindjet family of products. We're in the middle of it and we'll be much more efficient and effective when we launch and improve upon these initiatives...

Wallace, thanks so much for the kind words! It was a pleasure speaking with you and learning from your own deep experience in this emerging field!

Wallace Tait

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:47:40 +0000

After having a very enlightening telephone conversation with Michael Deutch, I certainly feel more confident and assured of further innovation and ground breaking developments from Mindjet. I felt Michael’s passion for the product, and he inspired me; by his knowledge of the information economy and the place that Mindjet MindManager deserves as a leading innovator within the Visual mapping arena.
If you use MindManager; you’ll certainly be cheering for Mindjet. I certainly support the product as a consultant, and with over 1.5 million users, it’s very clear Mindjet remain to lead the continuous software and cloud evolution of Visual to Knowledge management.
Catalyst shall, given the chance, further develop into a standard collaborative virtual office and data bank for the forward thinking information manager of this century.
I’m certainly going to keep an eye on the further development of Mindjet Catalyst.

JimB

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:57:11 +0000

Thanks Chuck et al for excellent comments. I echo my enthusiasm for MindJet the company and the products. I was a loyal customer from the initial product up to a version or so ago. I certainly share Steve Sisk's frustrations with the core performance of the product, but that is not why I stopped investing in it...

I switched to a Mac. The product on that platform has limped along well behind the Windows version. Michael is it fair to assume that with the architectural changes would come a cross platform core product that would allow desktop users on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux to enjoy the fruits of incremental and fundamental advancements in the product? It would not take much for MindJet to dominate the MAC market as well as the PC market. There are good products, but I believe Mindjet could stand up well to any of them.

Here's hoping...

Wallace Tait

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:37:33 +0000

Interesting José,
Would be interested in connecting with you.
Mail me at visualmapper @ gmail. com (just remove the spaces)

José M. Guerr

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:12:13 +0000

Working directly on MindManager maps seems to be a problem when you have many nodes or have special requirements.

Instead of waiting for improvements on MindManager, I am developing a system that reads the information from a mind map, stores it in a data base and processes the map directly from the data base.

I think this is a very interesting option. You stop having speed problems and have no limits to what can you do with your mind maps. Searches are a lot faster and mind maps are represented as trees. When you finish working with the map you create a MindManager map again with the new information.

I have developed applications of mind maps to Insurance and Banking and results are very satisfactory.

Anyone interested please contact me.

Wallace Tait

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:26:16 +0000

Hi Stefan the rude German :)

I think it’s great that Chuck is open minded enough to let his fellow Visual mappers vent in such manner. We all have the right to express our angst, frustrations and opinions......it’s all good.

This equates into feedback for Mindjet, and while I recall the time almost 5 years ago now, that I proposed a MindGenius “Map Explorer” clone for Mind Manager. I believe (the last time I checked) the forum request I started had over 100k hits and quite a few vociferous additions to the forum.

Nothing was done at all, but I collaborated with Michael Scherotter when he was with Mindjet, and he actually developed a draft of a Map Explorer. The unfortunate issue was; it just had to be yet another add-in :(

Recently I noted a third party developer created an explorer for MindManager, and it’s a good job. It does seem to me though, Mindjet certainly encourage third party add-in development; I just have to wonder when this bubble is going to burst.

The question must be asked though; is MindManager a capable standalone product, without any add-ins applied? IMO yes, it is indeed an excellent standalone Visual mapping product.

Mindjet may note though products such as MindMapper, MindView and the excellent open source Xmind have turnkey functions such as Gantt, timeline and scheduling functions as integral to the source code of the product.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a client, with whom I was encouraging to adopt MindManager, due to my needs assessment measure of their company information system. They chose one of the aforementioned turnkey products.

As surprised as I was; as a consultant I don’t sell software but, I was indeed surprised and interested to see this corporate user choose a product that does not encourage third party add-ins.

I pressed further, and they asked if a light version of MindManager was available; why I asked? We just won’t ever use the full functions of this excellent product.

So, maybe that’s what is required by a segment of potential users, a light version that gets the job done with minimal footprint on their system and thought processes. The desktop isn’t dead yet.

Just my thoughts :)

stevepane

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:11:29 +0000

Hi, this is Stefan the rude German...
Steve: your points are very, very true. I am complaining about this as well in the yahoo forum since quite a while...
Michael: It's always the same phrases and answers - but no change in the product or in Mindjet's behaviour - I experience this for quite a while now and I was directly in contact with Mindjets Advocat's, President's and Customer's whatever - hopeless. The old bugs and limitations are there for years and new issues show up instead of resolving the old ones. It's like telling my little son in July that Christmas is very, very near.
I am using MM since 10 years now but it's getting worse with every new version.

I am frustrated and I am heavily looking for alternatives. There are only a few because of the MM Add-Ins I am using. Which is strange situation if you think about it.

Let's see what christmas brings....

Wallace Tait

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:44:55 +0000

Yes it is great to have Michael Deutch jump in and reassure Mindjet have their finger on the voice of the customer (VOC) pulse. Mindjet MindManager is probably the majority usage amongst my client base, and it’s extremely important to me that Mindjet remain to be seen as being strong, in control and aware of the VOC.

Michael, help me understand more about the capabilities of Catalyst, for the sake of my client base who have expressed to me a frustration of product confusion over Connect versus Catalyst.
Maybe I have just become disconnected (pardon the pun) from that arena associated with Mindjet. I did at one time use Mindjet Connect as my virtual office, only to be disappointed with my own MindManager using colleague’s lack of Connect usage. I therefore had very few of my colleagues and associates logging into connect, that it became rather redundant for me.

The real fear of information security was a predominant question that was asked of me by my clients in relation to cloud computing in general; and I would certainly appreciate a reassurance from Mindjet regarding this very important issue, especially for corporate users.

Interesting comment relating to the database qualities of Catalyst Michael; excuse my ignorance. Knowledge mapping is IMO, the natural evolution for the Visual mapper, whilst MindManager does indeed offer multiple graphical formats as a true Visual mapping product; what’s the stable data load capacity of MindManager Catalyst? The Knowledge Mapping category at this time has Mindsystems Amode, The Brain and TopicScape as being heavy duty database products; it would be excellent to see MindManager be included with the likes of 50 gig stable data load, such as
Amode.

We Mindjet MindManager users have nothing to loose and everything to gain by persevering with the development stages of this excellent product. I look forward to seeing what's coming down the development pipeline from Mindjet.

Great product and excellent staff.

Regards
Wallace Tait
(Visualmapper)

Chuck Frey

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:01:12 +0000

Michael, thanks for jumping into the discussion here. It's good to know that Mindjet isn't resting on its laurels. I can appreciate the challenges you face...

Michael Deutch

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:54:45 +0000

Chuck, as always, great post!

Wallace, I'd keep an eye on Mindjet Catalyst for your list that meet database demands!

Christopher, how do I get me one of those machines :)

Alex, appreciate your empathy! It's very easy to criticize on the outside without truly understanding all the nuances and complexity of running a software business with 1.5 million customers using applications for a wide variety of purposes!

Steve, first, let me say that I'm sorry for any frustration you've been having with MindManager.

Let me share that your concerns are not being ignored here at Mindjet. And, I believe that you've hit the nail on the head with your recommendations for how Mindjet can approach fixing this issue. We've been looking at ways to do just that and, as of right now, plan to do so (ideally) in early in 2010.

I've been with Mindjet for almost 3 years now and I'm more excited than ever before!

We're doing the difficult dance of balancing the short, medium, and long term objectives. At times, that may appear like we're ignoring comments but we're also putting in place the architecture that'll help drive not incremental improvements but exponential ones. We're maturing, putting together processes and tools to make us more efficient and effective. Learning, and listening to our customers!

Recently, I've shifted focus from pure evangelism to join the 'product marketing' team.

The reason?

Bring the customer voice into our product lifecycle.

I'll continue writing and speaking about Mindjet but will be heavily focused on defining our market, understanding you, our users, and setting focus on new markets. I'll work with Mindjet's product team as your advocate to raise the priority on existing issues, balanced with the development to solve real market problems, and finally, better articulate our value and offerings.

Wallace Tait

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:46:02 +0000

May I point this forum to one of my recent blogs. Please share with any of your colleagues who are confused with the choices available relating to Mind, Visual and Knowledge mapping software.

IMO, Mindjet MindManager is indeed the deserved leader of the Visual mapping field. The trend though is for database capabilities to that take the visual mapping apps into the knowledge mapping arena. I see only three graphical applications being able to handle the database demands of the Visual mapper; Mindsystems Amode, The Brain and TopicScape.

Take a read at "Software choices for the information manager: at: http://visualmapper.blogspot.com/2009/08/software... Wallace Tait
(Visualmapper)

Christopher

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:04:15 +0000

I also spend a lot of time with Mind Manager (desktop version 8) although I am on a very fast computer (quad cpu, 8gb ram, intel second generation Solid State drive) I do not see as many problems with it on a day to day basis, but it is one of the slowest apps I use. Just started the application takes about as long as photoshop to actually 'stabilize" it starts just about instantly and loads the default map but then freezes for a little while before input is accepted. Once it is up and running it typically has no problems keeping up but considering the hardware I run it doesn't seem to run like what I would except. Even MS Word 2007 and Excel from a cold start will start and stabilize faster and we know Word has a few zillion lines of code.

I've seen the discussions as well probably in the same areas Steve frequents, so I know it is a growing concern, especially users on more typical hardware.

I have tried many of the mind mapping applications and I Mind Manager suits me the best.

Alex - Mindsystems T

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:54:53 +0000

Steve, great comments! Just to clarify I am in agreement with the general sentiment but was addressing the product and article specifically, not your post. You have some very valid observations though. As a third party it is very interesting for us to read. Alex

Steve Sisk

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:41:03 +0000

My comments were related to the desktop MindManager product I use every day. The MindManager forums on Yahoo! (I am sure other places as well) reflect chronic issues impeding the effective use of the product. Categorically, the issues discussed far surpass insignificant and trivial scenarios and occur frequently.

Erratic memory usage prevails as a one topic of frustration. Other problems include:

- Functions in earlier versions missing in newer versions.
- Inconsistent ink support.
- Increased resources consumption.
- Function maturity.
- Persistent issues from earlier releases.

Overall the user community is loyal in that they continue to use MindManager despite its deficiencies and continue to express anticipation of Mindjet addressing the problems. But when possible software alternatives are posted to these forums to mitigate the deficiencies of MindManager, I believe tolerance and patience are low.

I am a member of those loyal customers that want Mindjet to succeed in retaining and expanding MindManager's customer base. Having been on the product development side of things, my experience indicates that if a significant small percentage of the user base bring forward issues, most likely a majority of the remaining user base experienced the same problem.

I believe Mindjet could foster a better relationship with the user base through:

- Publishing user-reported problems and the interim solution along with the final resolution.

- Providing status on know problems and the patch level, release or version where the problem will be corrected.

- Facilitating a mechanism where the user base can
- Propose updates to or new function.
- Review proposed new or updated function (what the function will or won't do and how)
- Vote for the new or updated functions preferred in the next version or release.

- Fostering a better understanding of macros and add-in development even within the user community. Within the user base are very bright and driven people who will through necessity develop innovative and creative uses for MindManager given the opportunity and the knowledge.

All software products have flaws if for no other reason than people develop them. However, I have found that the difference between good software and bad software is the often based on a vendor's willingness to communicate those flaws and the plan to mitigate them. Understanding the problematic or immature functions within a product enables a user to pro-actively develop a mitigation plan.

Limited Mindjet resources factor into the function delivered in each release or function. Certain capabilities must be included to match or exceed the competition. However, I have witnessed repeatedly the ideas and needs of the user base steer a product exactly where it needed to go. That being said, a mix of Mindjet and user base initiated updates and new functions as I have experienced, yields the desired objective of market competitiveness and an excited user base maximizing the value of their software investment.

The underlying theme of many comments conveys a sense of being disconnected. By engaging users in the process, Mindjet will build inroads to an uncertain and frustrated user base .

You may contact me at steve(dot)sisk(at)gmail.com.

Alex - Mindsystems T

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:11:31 +0000

As the technical lead for Mindsystems (the group who develops Mindsystems Amode), over the years I have watched mind mapping applications go from a position of relative obscurity, to something most businesses have at least heard of (albeit often with misconceptions about the purpose and value). In having to support these applications it is always interesting to note how closely expectations and requirements of the users are aligned with the actual development result.

From time to time there can be a natural deviation between the desire and the result, that is to be expected. As developers we need to make sure that does occur too often, and does not affect too wide a cross-section. By the same token, no one release is going to solve everything, especially when requirements change so rapidly and expectations grow alongside relevance/usage. Throw into that mix a million voices all with individual and very valid requirements, and you have a monster task! I certainly can empathize with the MJ developers on this front.

In the case of Catalyst I think we have an impressive advancement here, but also totally support the idea there is more development work for Mindjet to complete. Of course you might predict a supportive statement from Mindsystems in relation to a Mindjet release, but anyone who knows our business well knows that we call it as we see it: the good, the bad and the ugly. Sometimes our brutal honesty gets us into hot water!! But for the most part I hope it is respected. Ultimately we think that is the only way to push forward and get a better result.

Also let’s not forget we are on the cutting edge here and you can’t get everything right in those cases. There is something of a seismic shift going on in the software world...with Microsoft madly trying to defend their traditional territory, ‘the desktop’ and all the while applications making what appears to be a logical jump to web/service models. For some that is a good thing, for others (hmmm maybe that is me) there are some inherent nasties lurking, but that is a whole different debate 

So my 2c is good job guys but let’s try to build and develop some more, paying careful attention to the end user’s voice. Thanks for your time in reading this. Alex

Peter Christian

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 16:40:00 +0000

I find that some tools are missing here. The ability to link multi-maps and create a holistic view of a larger project would be very helpful.

Wallace Tait

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 05:00:30 +0000

Steve,
As much as I accept your right to voice your opinion and vent; it would be very professional for you to reveal your URL, Blog or contact info for further dialogue.
So I guess you're not pleased with Mindjet Catalyst? (sic)
Wallace Tait
(Visualmapper)

Steve Sisk

Tue, 6 Oct 2009 14:36:14 +0000

I find Mindjet's continued investment in the MindManager product a strong indicator of Mindjet's intentions to expand the product's capabilities. However, I am astounded when Mindjet perpetually turns a deaf ear to the MindManager community's requests to mitigate fundamental issues with the MindManager product. Performance, memory and immature function issues inhibit realization of the full value of MindManager. Mindjet's reluctance to address fundamental issues yields disgruntled users losing faith in a product and vendor, and looking elsewhere for a solution though the alternative solution is inferior.

Should Mindjet choose to consume comments and questions in the various MindManager user community collaboration outlets, I believe Mindjet will feel the pulse of the MindManager user community and find the frustration, unproductive efforts, problems and support expectations of users. Despite Mindjet's performance, the users continue to anticipate resolution of the issues, albeit with little confidence.

A parallel analogy involves development of an airplane capable of flying at any incredible speeds at any altitude and is engineered to perform many feats thought impossible. An new engine designed and developed to propel the plane at the prescribed speeds and even more. As the plane traverses the runway, the landing gear separate from the pavement. The plane begins to gain altitude climbing toward the clouds. Suddenly, the engines slow and the engineers realize the wiring in the engines is incorrect. The engineers scramble to walk the co-pilot through cutting the wires attaching them correctly twisting them together and using chewing gum as an insulator and bonding agent. After a in-depth investigation, evidence surfaced that those assembling the engines repeatedly told the engineers of the critical issues, but those warnings were unheeded.

No matter how complex and intricate the fuselage, if the engines enabling the plane to perform marvelous maneuvers is faulty and unstable, the development and construction of the fuselage was in vain.

I think Mindjet should return to the fundamentals and underpinning core of the Mindjet product line, listen to the user community and rejuvenate MindManager to the fullest potential, stability and maturity of existing functions.

Application of lipstick no matter the quantity to a pig obfuscates little of the empirical evidence that the animal remains a pig.