From enrolling in graduate school, to attending conferences both locally and abroad, to buying tools and accelerators that improve work effectiveness, entrepreneurs and professionals often seek any and all forms of advantage possible in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Enter MindGenius 6. MindGenius is a mindmapping application that makes use of data visualization techniques to improve a person’s effectiveness in capturing, visualizing, and managing information. According to the product manufacturers, MindGenius is a great companion app for business users especially during conceptualization, brainstorming or planning sessions. It features built-in integration with Microsoft products such as Office, Outlook and Project, which is great. Its latest version, MindGenius 6, even features the ribbon interface popularized in Redmond’s latest Office productivity suite.
But how does it perform in real life?
After taking taking the app for a spin the past week, I am very much impressed with the utility of MindGenius 6. Being an entrepeneur myself, I found using MindGenius during a couple of strategy planning sessions and saw that it really is very beneficial not only to myself but to the team as well.
We love the app’s integration to popular cloud providers such as Dropbox, Box and Google Drive (which my team use interchangeably), it enabled our team to quickly share, view and edit mindmaps we’ve just discussed. The project management component is good; it features Gantt chart generation and customization, as well as the ability compute cost and quantity calculations. For simple projects that has minimal requirements, MindGenius can even replace Microsoft Project entirely.
We also appreciated the nifty Map Explorer mode that enables users to move quickly between high level and detailed views of information. The Report Generation feature, which automatically produces respectable reports directly from your project map data, is also a nice tool that will surely benefit project managers that need their reports done fast.
MindGenius 6 is available from the company’s website at three different price points: Corporate Sales (price N/A), Education Pricing (price N/A) and Business Edition (from $249). The price is not very cheap, so you might ask, should you buy one?
Final Thoughts
Well, from my brief experience with the appilcation, my answer is both a yes and a no. No, because majority of its features may be replicated by the tried and true method of jotting down notes in paper. Personally, at least, nothing beats that. Its organizing and data mapping features are nice, sure, as well as its integration with Microsoft products, but for the price, I think small business owners will find the balance between utility and price a bit unjustified.
However, if you are a mid to large-scale business owner (which I think is the target market for this app in the first place) with a bit more cash to spare, then MindGenius is a great utility application for your team. It will easily help your people prioritize, visualize trends, and see information in a different light.
The company says that a web version is in the works, which is aimed at being compatible to the standalone Windows app. Too bad though they do not have a Mac variant.
For more information, you may go check out their website at http://www.mindgenius.com/.
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