Ben’s Tech Blog

Some colleagues of mine (Ant and Gary) have been using Mind Manager as a way to brainstorm or map out projects into a logical format. I recently read a blog entry from Gary where he mentioned that he’d used Mind Manager to document the ITIL Service Management principles. I’m planning to do the ITIL foundation certificate so I thought it would be a nice study reference. With that thought in my mind, I realised that mind mapping could be a great way to compile study notes.

I’m currently studying for the Microsoft 70-291 exam, so I installed Mind Manger on Thursday night and started to play around with it. So far I have mapped out all of the DNS objectives and some of the IP Addressing/DHCP and Security topics. I’ve taken the approach of mapping out the exam objectives first (I’ve formatted the actual objectives with a different colour for clarity) and then branching out from each main topic with individual notes. It’s proved to be an extremely effective way to compile study notes and here is why:

• At any time you can see exactly where your notes fit into the overall objectives
• The map is easy to navigate through so it’s really easy to come back to a topic at a later stage and add some notes.
• You can add hyperlinks to each topic or sub-topic. I’ve added hyperlinks to a lot of topics that refer to articles that I’ve read in relation to the topic.

The mind mapping process feels organic. By that I mean that the way you map out topics in Mind Manager is similar to how you do it in your head (well in my mind anyway). I guess this is the reason why I like it so much.

Here are some pics of my study notes so far (still very much a work-in-progress).