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Mind-Mapping November 22, 2005

My friend and colleague Ant posts about Mindmapping, with the observation “I was introduced to the concept by a colleague a few months ago and now I’m hooked.”. What he neglects to mention is his original assessment of the technique - “oh no, Gary’s on another management fad!”. Just thought I’d call him out on it ;)

Glad you’ve come around to this stuff Ant - I don’t think a day goes by at the moment that I don’t do some form of mindmap. Not always as formal as a MindManager produced version, maybe just a back-of-the-envelope one, but it definately helps with the thought process.

And if you haven’t already seen it, you might want to look at the browser plugin for MindManager.

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OneNote Mobile

OK, so, if the RIM/NTP lawsuit goes in favor of NTP, and RIM actually does have to close down US operations (getting more unlikely, given the recent brief filed in interest by the US DOJ), this might be enough to make me happier about moving to a Windows Mobile device again.

Enter OneNote Mobile. OneNote Mobile is your portable extension to OneNote that you get when you purchase OneNote. You install it on your Windows Mobile SmartPhone (this is semi-automatic so it is low hassle) and you’re good to go. A few weeks ago, David Siedzik, the program manager for OneNote Mobile showed it to the mobile devices MVPs who were on campus and actually got a standing ovation! Read on to find out why.

When we shipped the syncing feature for mobile devices in OneNote 2003SP1, we had a few constraints that limited us to simply one-way sync (device to PC). A big one was that the built-in note applet was not designed with OneNote in mind, so it couldn’t handle our data unless it were “dumbed down” to plain text more or less. We didn’t have dev resources then to build our own SmartPhone client so that limitation wasn’t going away. We also found that most people were interested in the “upload” scenario, although plenty were also interested in bringing their data with them. So we did the relatively cheap thing which let you take notes on your device and see them in OneNote.

OneNote Mobile goes way beyond that. It is a real note taking app for your mobile device. You can take text notes, voice record, or snap them with a camera. It has a cool picture viewer for navigating the image in detail.

Goodies:

No PocketPC version at the moment - there’s several “votes” for that functionality in the comments of the source post, so that may change - you never know.

I’m a satisfied Blackberry user, but I also make a lot of use of OneNote as part of my personal GTD methodology, using OneNote as a primary capture device during meetings, brainstorm sessions, and so forth.  Being able to use it in a mobile fashion…  That’d be useful.


Microsoft - Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE)

Ray Ozzie on the above.

An extension to RSS intended to facilitate the sharing of data between disparate applications, such as calendar data between private, corporate and public calendar objects. Sounds like a better method than iCal at first blush. Be interesting to see what comes of this. The draft spec (0.9) for the extension is here. From the FAQ, this isn’t limited to calendar data though:

Just as RSS enables the aggregation of information from a variety of data sources, SSE enables the replication of information across a variety of data sources. Data sources that implement SSE will be able to exchange data with any other data source that also implements SSE.

From the user’s perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.

SSE is particularly useful for scenarios in which there are multiple masters and/or asynchronous updates. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse—either of you could enter new appointments, even if not currently connected. Similarly, SSE could be used to replicate a set of calendar entries among a group of people, each working in a different company and using different infrastructure.

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