How do you work with stakeholders to ensure that you have gathered the information required and then organize that information and communicate it back to the rest of the team? Mind-mapping tools that help with visualization and that are flexible and easy to use can be extremely helpful in this process.
In this session, we will discuss how to use a mind-mapping tool called MindManager for your SharePoint projects. We have discovered ways to use MindManager to gather information, present it back to the stakeholders and document the SharePoint architecture. While MindManager is a flexible tool, there are some places where it is not appropriate, and we explain when alternatives are more suitable.
We cover the use of mind-mapping  for:
- Scoping exercises: Customers are sometimes sold on SharePoint as a do-everything, solve-every-problem-now solution. Help them with brainstorming sessions to gather all ideas and pain points and then organize and prioritize the results.
- Document organization: Analyze the types of documents that currently exist and group them for the purposes of creating content types.
- Navigational Architecture: Work interactively with the team to experiment with, and then finalize, the site navigation.
- Site documentation: Show the site hierarchy with all libraries, lists and content types.
In addition to mind-mapping, we will be discussing the wire-framing of screen layouts. Wire framing is a way to give your stakeholders a rough idea of how the SharePoint pages will appear on the screen. In the past, this was a tedious job with diagrams that were painful to update. We will demonstrate a new wire framing tool from Balsamiq that makes this process much faster, simpler and more useful. Its ease of use means it can be used interactively during brainstorming sessions, short-circuiting the design process.