MindManager® is a great application for managing documents and files of all types in a visually rich graphical interface. The ability to hyperlink files of any type to topics in your maps allows you to create powerful management dashboards and portal/repository indexes to help you access, amend and manage files from many different locations.
This makes MindManager® ideally suited for use in Project and Quality Management, Sales and Marketing, Design and Development, Customer Account Management and Technical Authoring to mention just a few areas of application where multiple documents and files are being accessed, updated and re-distributed across teams and throughout organizations. If you are managing these documents and files in conjunction with a Document Management System (DMS) such as MicroSoft® SharePoint®, Google® Docs or another DMS then you already have a solution for your document control. But what if you don’t have MicroSoft® SharePoint®, perhaps it is too expensive for your company to purchase or too complex to administrate. Perhaps you are not comfortable having your documents hosted on a web-based system and may even have policies in place which prevent such cloud based storage systems from being used. When that is the situation you may find yourself asking the following:
Q. How can you enable simple document control with MindManager®?
A. Install OPTi-Docs™.
OPTi-Docs™ for MindManager® is an add-in available for users of MindManager® Pro 6, MindManager® 7 Pro, MindManager® 8 and MindManager® 9 and enables the simple management of hyperlinked documents which are stored locally. It adds a new Task Pane to MindManager® that displays document information and status for any document placed under OPTi-Docs™ control when a topic containing a “controlled” document is selected.
New documents can be added to map topics and placed under control in one action just as easily as those already linked to a topic. Once placed under OPTi-Docs™ control, the document can then be Checked-in/Checked-out for editing, the status can be changed between Draft and Approved, revision notes/comments can be recorded on both Check-in and Check-out and each previous revision of the document is automatically created and stored while the document revision is auto-incremented.
The heart of the add-in is the OPTi-Docs™ Document Management Task Pane. This allows you to access a menu that holds the commands for manipulating documents as well as a Settings and Properties panel where document storage settings can be amended and details of controlled documents on selected topics are displayed. There are also indicators to show when documents are accessible to the user i.e. “On-line” or “Off-line”.
An Actions menu button provides access to additional features that enable you to pull revision history for a selected controlled document into your map as either a new topic of hyperlinked revisions or as attachments to the topic holding the controlled document. Ideal for when you need to send the map to a colleague or user who does not have access to the Document History Folder where all the revisions are located.
The Check-in/Check-out feature enables you to provide comments on the document status and in the case of checking a document out you can choose between two states: Exclusive or Non-exclusive. A document that is checked out as Exclusive will only be editable by you whereas a Non-exclusive document can be edited or checked-in by another user.
When a document is checked-out, other OPTi-Docs™ users can see who has checked the document out via a blue link-label shown against the Status field in the Task Pane. Clicking this generates an email request to the document holder so you can enquire as to the current status of the document.
These simple yet valuable features of OPTi-Docs™ provide the MindManager® user with an alternative option to document control when some of the previously mentioned DMS are not an option.
Finally…We have mentioned the word “Documents” consistently throughout this blog post but remember, OPTi-Docs™ can manage almost ANY file you hyper-link to your map topics, provided you have full permissions, making it great for controlling any file whether its a document, MP3 music track, ZIP archive, JPEG, PDF, or AVI etc.
Visit Olympic Limited, www.olympic-limited.co.uk, for more details on OPTi-Docs™ for MindManager® including 14 day trials for MindManager® 6, 7, 8 and 9, launch incentives and product bundle offers as well as other great MindManager® add-ins and solutions.