Visual Mind 9 beta enables real-time collaboration on maps

Mind Technologies has just announced a public beta test program for Visual Mind 9. The most important new feature is real-time map sharing, via a new Visual Mind Server that manages collaboration between users. Any changes made to a shared Visual Mind map will immediately be made available to other users who are working on it. This is an important breakthrough for users of mind mapping software, who (according to my surveys) say this is one of their biggest needs.

Other new features in Visual Mind include:

• Support for Excel spreadsheets, which can be viewed and edited from within a Visual Mind map.
• Calculation values - you can calculate totals for sub-trees and maps
• Direct linking with Microsoft Outlook elements - Visual Mind 8 offered some integration with Outlook, but only pulled copies of elements into the map. In Visual Mind 9, these are now live connections, so that a change in one will change the element in the other program.
• Enhanced search capabilities
• Web snapshots - A neat idea. Instead of displaying a link icon on a branch, you have the option in Visual Mind 9 to display a thumbnail image of the web page to which you're linking.

To learn more about this beta program and download the Visual Mind 9 client and server software, please click here.