You know the situation. Its happened to you time and time again. You’re deep in concentration, working on a project or task that required your undivided attention when into your mind pops and idea. Its a good one too. You make a mental note to remember to revisit the thought AFTER you have completed your current objective…times ticks on…you complete your objective and then wonder “now what was that great idea I had earlier…?”.

We’ve all been there, but now you can say goodbye to lost ideas, forgotten tasks and nagging distractions….with myThings™ for MindManager®, developed by necsus it.consulting of Denmark and distributed globally by Olympic.

After a very popular and interactive beta programe, we are pleased to announce that today, myThings™ for MindManager® is on general release and avialable to trial for 30 days and purchase from Olympic.

myThings™ for MindManager® integrates seamlessly into MindManager® version 8/9 and allows you to capture information and schedule it for later attention, delegation and organisation, making sure you don’t lose those all important pieces of information that threaten to disrupt your daily productivity and concentration.

More information can be found on the myThings™ product page located here and you can purchase myThings™ for MindManager® on the Buy Online page located here.

You can download a fully functional trial for Mindmanager 8/9 on the product page to try myThings before deciding to purchase.

The beta downloads for myThings™ for MindManager® are available to download now for MindManager® 8 and MindManager® 9.

If you were registered on the beta programme you should have received an email now allowing you to acess the downloads page.

If you have not yet registered then please do so below and you will gain access to the downloads upon registration.

We look forward to providing another valuable addition to our range of Mindjet® MindManager® Add-ins and thank you for your continued and valued support.

In this issue:

• myThings™ – New MindManager Add-in in Beta!
• MindMappers Ning Network under New Management!
• New Products from ABBYY!
• The February MindManager® Add-in Competition Winner!
• On the Horizon!

myThings™ – New MindManager Add-in in Beta!

Olympic are pleased to announce the beta programme for a new add-in for MindManager called myThings™. This new add-in is brought to you through collaboration with the developer & vendor of myThings™, necsus it.consulting of Denmark.

myThings™ is a productivity add-in that helps you maintain focus and capture ideas and thoughts without interrupting workflow on your current task. It allows you to organise and manage ideas and tasks for action when time allows.

The beta programme is about to start so make sure you are one of the first to try this exciting new MindManager extension by registering below.

MindMappers Ning Network Under New Management

The MindMappers Ning Network, also known as the MindManager Enthusiasts Network, was recently transferred to the ownership and management of Olympic.

We would like to thank CJ Cornell, the Network creator for agreeing to and organising this transfer of ownership and we look forward to opening the Network to vendors and users of all Information Management products, tools and disciplines over the coming months.

If you are not a member already, visit the Network and register to become involved in discussions and opinions and access other Information Management resources from around the world.

Visit the NEW MindMappers Ning…

New Products from ABBYY®

In keeping with our focus on products and applications that help users to manage information we have added a new range to the Olympic portfolio. The products offered by ABBYY are some of the best in the world for document recognition and PDF transformation and their award-winning range are used by industries of all sectors.

ABBYY provide easy-to-use software that helps their customers save money and increase productivity by unlocking information from paper scans (TIFs, GIFs, JPEGs, etc.) and image only PDFs, converting the data to editable information for use in Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, RTF, HTML and so forth.  FineReader helps employees save the time typically spent on manual retyping or data entry as well as enabling far quicker access – via full text searching – for their ever-increasing information.

You can find more information about PDF Transformer and FineReader on the Products page.

The February MindManager® Add-in Competition Winner!

We are pleased to announce the winner of our Newsletter competition for February.

The lucky reader chosen was Mal Evans of JCR IT

Mal chose a free licence of OPTi-Docs™ for MindManager and had this to say:

“Since I work in sales I have a lot of proposals in various stages of preparation so I have chosen OPTi-Docs to allow me to better manage all the relevant documents I am working with. This will bring me further to being able to use Mind Manager as my central repository of all my information.”

You can learn more about Mal on his linked in profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/malevans

Don’t forget we are giving away a MindManager® add-in of choice from our OPTi-Range EVERY month during 2011 so make sure you and your friends and colleagues are signed up to the Olympic Newsletter to be in with a chance of winning. You can do this from the Olympic Home Page.

On the Horizon!

Updates continue with OPTi-P2™ our PRINCE2® Solution for MindManager®. We are sightly behind our planned release for this update but are nearing completion of the first round of updates.

That’s all until April’s issue…Thank you for reading

Kind Regards
Nigel Goult
Managing Director

Olympic are pleased to announce the imminent release of a new add-in for Mindjet® MindManager® to help users capture, distribute and organise their daily tasks and activities. myThings™ for MindManager is brought to you through a new collaboration between the developer, necsus it.consulting of Denmark and Olympic Limited.

The add-in will go into beta at the beginning of April and is planned for general release in early May. The new collaboration between necsus it.consulting and Olympic will provide yet another quality extension for Mindjet® MindManager® and bring the total number of add-ins available to eight making Olympic one of the largest providers of MindManager® add-ins/extensions.

Join the beta

If you would like to participate in the beta of myThings™ for MindManager® and get an early look at this new add-in then please visit the beta registration page here or complete the registration form below.

Once registered you will receive an email confirming your registration and a second email when the beta build is available. This will include help documentation to get you started and guidance on how to get the most from your time spent using myThings for MindManager®.

We look forward to providing another valuable addition to our range of Mindjet® MindManager® Add-ins and thank you for your continued and valued support.

In this issue:

• OPTi-Suite™ MindManager® Utility Add-in Updated!
• MindManager® Maintenance & Support Offer!
• The March Mindjet® Roadshow!
• The January MindManager® Add-in Competition Winner!
• On the Horizon!

OPTi-Suite™ MindManager® Utility Add-in Updated!

We are pleased to announce a new update to our popular Mindjet® MindManager® add-in, OPTi-Suite™ version 2.5.

With this update we have added two new utilities, Auto-Views for Topic Relationships and Topic Task Information as well as a new improved menu with new icons. We have also tightened the error checking and functions to make them more robust and versatile.

OPTi-Suite™ now contains 12 utilities including:

Map Topics2Left
This function allows you to open a map which has its Topic alignment set to Left so that all new Topics created are added to the left hand side of the map.

Link2Attachment
A handy utility that will convert a hyper linked document such as a PDF file or a Word document and change it to an Attachment (embedded within the map). The add-in also allows you to either keep the current hyperlink or have it replaced which allows for additional flexibility.

Auto-View Relationships
Toggle the ability to auto-view Topics when they are connected by a Relationship

Auto-View Task Information
Toggle the ability to auto-view the Task Management Task Pane when selecting Topics that contain Task information

Topic+Topic
Allows you to add selected Topics, (providing they have a numerical text title), and have the sum either displayed on screen or added to the map.

Topic Calculator
Use on a numerical Topic to display different conversions such as Miles/Kilometers, Inches/Feet etc. Also allows basic math calculations on the selected Topic and the result added to the map.

Topic Text Lock/Un-Lock
This utility allows you to select a Topic and then lock the text so it can not be changed by other users of the map, (unless they have OPTi-Suite installed). When a Topic is locked, it is indicated by a padlock icon on the Topic.

Topics2Map Marker
Creates Map Marker Group and Markers from Topics.

Topics2Text Notes
Takes the selected Topic and steps through the sub-topics and converts them into Text Notes of the selected Topic.

Topic2Vertical
Takes the selected Topic and makes the Topic orientation vertical. This allows the user to select the character spacing of the resulting Topic as well.

Topic2Date
Takes the selected Topic and inserts a user selected date. The user can select to have the day of the week added to the Topic if desired.

Topic2CallOut
Change Topics to Call-Out Topics or back again with a single click.

Download a 14 day trial today and try OPTi-Suite™ in conjunction with your Mindjet® MindManager® work.

Latest Downloads

Mindjet® Maintenance & Support Offer

Olympic are offering  a new purchasing incentive for those customers who are looking to purchase MindManager® for Corporate or Government use under the Mindjet® 5Plus Licence Program.

The Mindjet® 5Plus Licence Program, (View 5Plus PDF), enables businesses to purchase MindManager® with the benefits of upgraded technical support, single licence key deployment making licence control and compliance easier together with no cost upgrades when newer versions become available.

Currently all purchases for 5 or more MindManager® licences require Maintenance & Support which equates to 20% of the licence costs. This is an annual cost which can be renewed each year to maintain the benefits of the program. The Maintenance & Support costs on a typical purchase for 5 users is £ 39.80 per licence, per annum, (£ 33.83 for Government). This reduces slightly when 10 or more licences are purchased but remains at 20% of the licence cost.

From now until 31st March 2011 Olympic are offering to cover the first years Maintenance & Support costs on all 5Plus licence purchases enabling savings starting from £ 199.00. The more licences purchased the more you will save. If you already have a 5Plus agreement in place you can also take advantage of this offer when adding additional licences to your current agreement. In this situation Olympic will cover the pro-rata Maintenance & Support costs for the additional licences.

If your a new Mindjet® 5Plus customer you can view pricing and place your order on-line here. If you already have a Mindjet® 5Plus agreement and are looking to add licences then please call us on +44 208 144 4224 for a bespoke quotation.

Terms & Conditions

Offer is only applicable to full licence purchases. Upgrades are not eligible.
Payment must be made at the time of order.
Can not be used in conjunction with any other Olympic offer or discount incentives.
All prices quoted above excl. VAT

The March Mindjet® Roadshow

Improve communications and collaboration across any orginisation using interactive, information rich Mindjet maps. Easily share maps, collaborate and communicate directly with suppliers, employee’s and virtual project teams.

In the best practice seminar we will address:

• Top 5 business pains of sharing information across the organization

• Information mapping software as a one-stop solution to optimize communication, collaboration and sharing

• Customer use cases featuring brainstorming, strategy, projects and communication

Dates & Venues

• Wednesday 9th March 2011, Lords Cricket Ground – Register
• Thursday 10th March 2011, Old Trafford Cricket Ground – Register

The January MindManager® Add-in Competition Winner!

We are pleased to announce the winner of our Newsletter competition for January.

The lucky reader chosen was Noel Austin.

Noel chose a free licence of OPTi-Docs™ for MindManager and had this to say:

“I use Mind Manager as a way of organising my thoughts about new concepts and projects and tend to produce multiple versions of lots of documents. OPTi-Docs will give me an excellent way of keeping control of them.”

You can learn more about Noel on his linked in profile: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/noelaustin

Don’t forget we are giving away a MindManager® add-in of choice from our OPTi-Range EVERY month during 2011 so make sure you and your friends and colleagues are signed up to the Olympic Newsletter to be in with a chance of winning. You can do this from the Olympic Home Page.

On the Horizon!

After our recent update of OPTi-Suite™ we are now turning our development resources to OPTi-P2™ our PRINCE2® Solution for MindManager®.

We will be adding enhancments and improvments based on user feedback we have received over the past few months and will be looking to have an updated version by the end of Q1.

Current users will receive the upgraded version free of charge and will be notified when the download is available.

That’s all until March…Thank you for reading

Kind Regards
Nigel Goult
Managing Director

During 2011 Olympic will be offering one lucky reader the choice of a FREE, Not For Resale licence of one of our OPTi-Range of Mindjet® MindManager® Add-ins EVERY MONTH.

If you are subscribed to the Olympic Newsletter, you could be one of twelve lucky subscribers that will be picked throughout this year to choose a FREE licence from the following Mindjet® MindManager® add-ins developed by Olympic: OPTi-Docs™, OPTi-P2™, OPTI-Q™ and OPTi-Suite™.

At the end of each month we will at random select a subscriber from our Newsletter list and notify them by email of their good fortune. They will then have the choice of receiving a FREE licence for one of the previously mentioned Mindjet® MindManager® Add-ins developed by Olympic. Winners will be listed in the following Olympic Newsletter.

Remember. There is nothing you have to do other than register for our Newsletter, that’s it.

You can sign up to the Newsletter below or from our Home Page. Good luck!

Olympic are pleased to announce the release of OPTi-Docs™ for MindManager®, a simple document management add-in for users of MindManager Pro 6, MindManager Pro 7, MindManager 8 and Mindmanager 9.

One of the first things that most users of Mindjet® MindManager® do when they start using the application is link documents into their maps. MindManager® users in disciplines from Project Management to Technical Authorship and users groups from Project Teams to individual Lawyers or Solicitors are all managing documentation of one type or another in their MindManager® Maps.

Minutes from meetings, project documentation such as Project Briefs, Risk Logs, Plans etc, Customer Proposals, Books, Specifications,Quotes/Tenders and Presentations, the list is endless. All of these documents change during their lifetime creating multiple instances of the document over each iteration/revision and ideally you need to keep records/copies of these changes to provide audit accountability or to reference at a later date. That’s where OPTi-Docs™ comes in.

Up until now there has been no real way of controlling the localised documents that MindManager® is linked to and although you can open documents and then edit them there is no simple way to keep a history of the revisions of a particular document (or any file type for that matter) without having to manually create copies and rename files etc. OPTi-Docs™ for MindManager® changes all of that.

OPTi-Docs™ adds a Document Management Task Pane to MindManager® allowing the user to carry out basic document management activities on selected documents such as document check-out, document check-in, editing of checked-out documents, automatic document version increment, automatic document revision creation and storage as well as visual indication of selected document status and change history.

Learn more – Download a  trial – View the User Guide

In this issue:

• OPTi-P2™ for Windows® Arrives!
• PersonalBrain™ 6 released!
• Biggerplate Map Portal News and Competition Offer!
• On the Horizon!

OPTi-P2™ for Windows® Arrives!

Olympic are proud to unveil our first independent software application for Microsoft® Windows®, OPTi-P2™.

Hot on the heels of our launch earlier this year of OPTi-P2™ for MindManager® we are pleased to now offer an alternative version of this unique PRINCE2® Project Management Support tool that runs on Windows® WITHOUT the need for any other supporting software (excepting Microsoft® Office for reporting).

This new edition allows us the opportunity to extend the functionality of OPTi-P2™ and include some more advanced features, such as Document Management with check in and check out control, visual navigational aids more in line with those of the OGC material, improved process tracking and documenting as well as retaining the same easy to access official OGC content available on demand whenever you need it.

OPTi-P2™ for WIndows® is an excellent learning tool for those studying for the PRINCE2® qualification and can help support your first projects managed with the method whilst cementing your new found knowledge.

Available in a free to use reduced feature version or a low-cost paid licence version, OPTI-P2® for Windows® is a cost effective way to manage the PRINCE2® documentation for all your projects.

Try it today with a free 30 day, no obligation trial.

Visit the dedicated OPTi-P2® for Windows® website at www.opti-p2.com for further details,
trials and user documentation.

PersonalBrain™ 6 Released!

TheBrain Technologies, the leading provider of dynamic visualization and knowledgebase software, announced its newest release, PersonalBrain 6, which augments PersonalBrain publishing and provides synchronization of Brains across multiple platforms and machines.

PersonalBrain’s context rich interface provides an intelligent platform for sharing large information sets. Business managers, researchers, teachers, hobbyists and users worldwide publish their brains online at http://webbrain.com. PersonalBrain 6 takes Brain publishing to the next level by enabling one-step synchronization to WebBrain.com. Now users can share, backup, and synchronize across multiple platforms for universal access to their digital thinking.

PersonalBrain 6 has over 100 new features and enhancements including:

• One Click WebBrain Publishing – Share your Brain with the world on WebBrain.com. Users can publish publicly, unlisted or privately. Send links to key Thoughts or areas in their Brain and track comments from the WebBrain.com community. Published Brains can be embedded in blogs or Web sites and are searched and indexed by all search engines.
• Secure Synchronization and Backup – Get access to your complete digital memory and knowledgebase anywhere. Synchronize your Brain across multiple machines, platforms and location. One step WebBrain publishing gives users and their coworkers instant access to information online or offline on the desktop.
• Increased Performance – Work at the speed of Thought with twice the navigation speed powered by an augmented database backend. PersonalBrain’s dynamic user interface enables one to visually navigate across all relevant information quickly and intelligently. PersonalBrain 6 makes digital Brains even faster and more reliable. This increased speed further enhances the ability to easily create Brains with hundreds of thousands of Thoughts while increasing productivity.
• Transparent Visualization – Connect your thinking to your work patterns. With PersonalBrain 6’s transparent mode users can float their Brains over top of their desktop or any application while still working. This revolutionary view enables Thought visualization to be seamlessly integrated with any activity.
• Windows Explorer Integration – Organize files and documents under multiple topics so you can move beyond linear file folder structures. With PersonalBrain 6 in addition to easy drag and drop of files, users can now right click on any file and use the “Send To” command to instantly add it to their Brain. Now, no file is more than two clicks away from your Brain.
• More Tools for Getting Things Done – Get complete task management and mental clarity by creating Thoughts for all key tasks and projects in your life. Action-oriented PersonalBrains enhance productivity. With PersonalBrain 6 users can gain control of projects and to-dos with checkbox lists in notes, a more powerful calendar, and Google calendar synchronization.
• Augmented Thought Type Visualization – Create key information types and tag information with a wide variety of attributes to further delineate information and contextualize tasks. PersonalBrain 6’s new Thought Type display lets you visualize relationships between types and centralizes management of types.

PersonalBrain 6 Pricing and Availability

PersonalBrain 6 is a complimentary upgrade to registered PersonalBrain 5.0 users who purchased after February 1, 2010.

PersonalBrain 6 is offered in three editions: Free, Core, and Pro (the most powerful edition). PersonalBrain Free is offered at no charge. The Free edition does not expire and lets anyone link ideas and Web pages on their desktops. See here for Pro and Core edition pricing.

PersonalBrain 6 is cross platform and runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux machines and is available in 7 languages. English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Dutch.

Bigger Plate Map Portal News and Competition Offer!

Some of you are probably aware of biggerplate.com, the on-line portal for sharing MindManager maps but we wanted to let all our readers know that there are great plans in store for the site in the coming months. The site currently has the largest collection of MindManager maps on-line, all free to download and use, so head along and get yourself registered and don’t forget to bookmark this excellent resource for repeat visits and stay tuned for some great enhancements to be announced soon.

Olympic are currently supporting Biggerplate in their efforts to engage more users and grow their map content for current and future members of the site. Upload a map today for your chance to win a MindManager Super Bundle including MindManager 9, OPTi-Suite and Power Markers add-ins.

Visit www.biggerplate.com for further details on how to enter and get yourself registered on this top resource portal.

On the Horizon!

We would like to take this opportunity to tell you about some upcoming news items to keep your eyes peeled for in the next few months and into Q1 of 2011, oh my goodness what happened to 2010?? .

New products – We are currently looking at two new products we hope will be joining the current Olympic product portfolio. They are both very visual and fit in with our overall positioning of applications that help you manage information in a visual manner. We will publish more information shortly so please check the Olympic website regularly for updates on these new additions which will hopefully be available by the end of the year.

New add-ins – Also coming down the line is a new MindManager® add-in which will release within the next few weeks. The add-in will be invaluable for anyone using MindManager® to manage linked documents and files. It is planned to be available for MindManager versions 6, 7, 8,and 9 and promises to be another popular extension to the market leading mapping application. If you would like to be emailed when the add-in is available then please send an email to this address and we will let you know the minute it is available on general release.

That’s all until the next issue.

Thank you for reading…..
Kind Regards
Nigel Goult
Managing Director