A short screencast demoing one of my favorite remote team collaboration tools: MindMeister. In it, I demonstrate how mind maps can be built collaboratively by multiple users, and talk a little about how this can be useful in remote meetings.
This is not a traditional review, more of an overview. Putting on my editorial hat for a moment, I’ve never found the standard blog or magazine review format very useful. I don’t want to see a long back-and-forth of “pros” vs. “cons”, and I have no idea what “3.7 out of 5” means. All I really care about is a) what does the product do? and b) assuming it does something I need, is it worth using or not? With that in mind, my “reviews” on Wide Teams will have two simple goals: giving you an idea of what the product does, and telling you who (if anyone) would benefit from it.
In this case, the product in question is MindMeister. I’ve introduced MindMeister on every distributed team I’ve worked with, and everyone always loves it. It’s a terrific tool for taking notes and brainstorming. You can get information into it quickly, and then incrementally rearrange and organize the information as you discuss it in more depth. I think that any dispersed team that has remote meetings is likely to get value from it.
Avdi — looks like a great tool. We’ve used Freemind in the past, which is really powerful and cross-platform, but lacks the collaborative features.
MindMeister can export (and import as well, I believe) Freemind format, so you can use the two together.
We’ve used it for distributed retrospectives. I definitely like it. However, it ain’t cheap!