Well my social network worked last night. Three sources recommended the same pub “The Wellington” and one of them, Roger Vanstone met us there and took Bill Creekbaum and I to his favourite Indian restaurant the “Al Faisal“. Suprisingly we were back in the hotel by 11pm.
It was short walk from the hotel to the Raddisson Blu, the Road Show venue. Very helpful staff and a nice well lit room. Pity they did not notice the projector was set to low brightness. I fixed that for the second half.
Again a long term friend appeared Maurice Poole who has worked for me in the ConferenceREACTION team. Also Mike Hodkinson who I have met at previous events and online. Very nice also to get compliments from a couple of members of the silent majority who read what I write in the forums and on this blog (note to self you don’t need to add a link here because they are here:) ).
Back to content. As far as I can tell Bill’s presentation was the similar to yesterday’s but we had two longer discussions. One about the Gantt chart view addressing the concerns of the audience. Those that attended now have a much better understanding of why MindManager 9 did not meet some of our expectations. The good news is planning tasks within a day will be possible in MindManager 9.1. Today’s project challenge was planning a party for the Pope’s visit to Birmingham on Sunday. Did we get to the emailing the Pope an invitation stage?
We were also enlightened about how to remove the offset in the slide view. Just drag the left or right hand edge of the frame across, similar to adjusting the topic width but the width remains the same. I also discovered that hiding topics in the map does not hide them in the slide. If you want to hide topics, do it in the slide views. The short keys work in slide view e.g. Ctrl-F5 to fill the slide with the map snippet.
Again my general understanding of SharePoint was improved by the presentation of James Hoggett of Contact and Code. Several big businesses are using it for their intranet sites and James showed us a few home pages. MindManager Explorer for SharePoint looks as though it will add great dashboarding capability to individuals and teams who want quick access to relevant and important items from MindManager. James noted that the MindManager Add In was the easiest he had come across to integrate with an exisiting SharePoint Server.
Using the Tablet PC, the web export and share tool to publish meeting notes part of my presentation, generated many questions during the session and at lunch. Again this group choose Inspiration and Project Management from my four offered topics. I used the hyperlinks to the map sharing sites to give the audience an appreciation of what is available to inspire them. I will publish the full map after the last road show.
On my way home now. Why is the standard of the Virgin first class service on the London Birmingham route not repeated on the Birmingham Winchester route? No WiFi, no snack, no free beer and typically they ran out of hot drinks (free) for a while. Thank goodness the power socket worked.
See you in Manchester on Tuesday at the Mindjet MindManager 9 Road Show.
