Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Almost all businesses rely to one degree or another on new ideas developed and perfected in brainstorming sessions and honed in more structured meeting later in the process. A number of years ago, a new type of software emerged to aid in this process, known generically as mind-mapping. Historically, mind-map software has been expensive, especially for young companies that are most in need of it.

Perhaps the best known of the commercial offerings is MindManager. Now there is a piece of free (as in beer) Open Source software that has much of MindManager’s functionality at 0% of the cost. This product is named FreeMind and it is brought to you in Java, so it runs on almost any platform. This software package is useful for:

• Keeping track of projects, including subtasks, state of subtasks and time recording
• Project workplace, including links to necessary files, executables, source of information and of course information
• Workplace for internet research using Google and other sources
• Keeping a collection of small or middle sized notes with links on some area which expands as needed. Such a collection of notes is sometimes called knowledge base.
• Essay writing and brainstorming, using colors to show which essays are open, completed, not yet started etc, using size of nodes to indicate size of essays. I don't have one map for one essay, I have one map for all essays. I move parts of some essays to other when it seems appropriate.
• Keeping a small database of something with structure that is either very dynamic or not known in advance. The main disadvantage of such approach when compared to traditional database applications are poor query possibilities, but I use it that way anyway - contacts, recipes, medical records etc. You learn about the structure from the additional data items you enter. For example, different medical records use different structure and you do not have to analyze all the possible structures before you enter the first medical record.
• Commented internet favorites or bookmarks, with colors and fonts having the meaning you want.

The current version of the software has the following features:

• Fully functional following of HTML links stored in the nodes, be it www links or links to local files.
• From very early versions, Freemind supports folding which is its essential property.
• Fast one-click navigation, including folding / unfolding on one click and following links on one click at the same time (you don't have to make choice between fast following of links and fast fold/unfold). You can move the map by dragging the map's background as well as using mouse wheel.
• Undo
• Smart Drag'n Drop, including the possibility to copy nodes or copy style of nodes; dragging and dropping of multiple selected nodes; dropping of texts or list of files from outside
• Smart copying and pasting into, including pasting of links from HTML or structuring the pasted content on the basis of the number of leading spaces in a line; pasting of lists of selected files
• Smart copying and pasting from, including plain text and RTF (MS Wordpad, MS Word, MS Outlook messages).
• Export of map to HTML, with folding (see example (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/PublicMaps-exported.html))
• Find facility, where found items are shown one by one as you do "find next", and the map is unfolded only for the current item.
• Possibility to use and edit long multiline nodes; even with newlines
• Possibility to decorate nodes with built-in icons, colors and different fonts.
• Low costs of risk of switching away to another mind mapping tool, because FreeMind stores maps in XML format. If you have a lot of maps created by FreeMind and you want to switch to another program, writing a conversion program should be easy, especially if that program features Visual Basic scripting facility.
• File mode enables you to browse the files on your computer, seeing the folder structure as mind map.

As noted above, the FreeMind is written in Java and will therefore run on any platform that allows the Java run-time environment.