Mike Fortgens twittered me on a couple of things he needs clarified when using the Mind Manager Templates for SharePoint. This is a 4 minute demo to show how you can utilize the Mind Map that was made available in this week’s newsletter to create your own, custom templates.

I have spent the past month working on the creation of Mind Map templates for the major architectural components in SharePoint. As I have shown them to people, there has been tremendous excitement about using them for developing site plans during brainstorming sessions.

I spent the weekend working out the permission level templates for the Mind Manager Templates for SharePoint project. Here’s a quick three minute screencast. As always, your feedback will be very helpful as I continue to expand on this project.

The first session of “Congratulations! You’re a site manager… now what?” is completed. This workshop implemented a set of drag-and-drop site planning templates for SharePoint. I’m looking forward to the participant feedback since this was the first session.

The session tomorrow will use Mind Manager 8 and predefined templates I have created for building quick site plans for a SharePoint site collection. The original title of the workshop wasn’t clear about the purpose, so I changed it to “Congratulations! You’re a site manager… now what?”, which buried what we will actually be doing.

Planning and organizing SharePoint lab in a virtual environment. Organizing a “SharePoint team”
Planning your sites with Mind Manager. Simple, easy, effective use cases and scenarios you could deploy to your intranet site. Creating KPIs on top of Windows SharePoint Services
Using simple web parts and scripts to change SharePoint UI: collapse quick launch, adjust a web part size automatically, add menu items, create preview panes and much more

After my initial introduction to mind mapping with MindManager, last week I introduced the idea of using mind mapping techniques for Building Navigational Taxonomies

I use Mindjet’s MindManager for Mind Mapping. There are other options out there, but I’ve been very happy with MindManager
Designing the navigation of your SharePoint site is a task that can be difficult and drawn-out. There are often competing visions of how the site should look and political pressures from managers who want to ensure that their place in the hierarchy is as prominent as possible. By default, there is often a temptation to have the structure of the site mirror the structure of the org-chart. This may seem easy at first, but will cause problems in the long run.