6. Collaboration

One of the biggest advantages, Mind42 has over conventional mind mapping applications, are collaborations. It's so important that this feature even made it into the name of application: Mind-Four-Two to be read as Mind for two. Collaboration allows you to work with multiple people on the same project - simultaneously just over the Internet.

6.1 Setting up and managing collaborations

Before you can collaborate with others you will have to grant them access to your map. Like managing revisions and publishing the map, this only can be done by the creator of the mind map. The link to the collaboration management dialog can be found at the top left and middle area of the menu bar. To invite new collaborators just enter their e-mail addresses into the text field (separated by commas or line breaks) and click invite. You optionally also have the possibility to NOT allow the invited collaborators to make any changes. Like this they can observer what's done, but can't change anything themselves. After clicking invite another text field will come up in which you can enter an optional invitation message. Finally after pressing the "Send invitations" buttons e-mails will be sent to the given email addresses, which allow the recipients to join the map.

The e-mail, the recipients get, only contains a special Mind42 link. It's like a key to your map, which initially is not bound to an account. When the recipient clicks this link and already has a Mind42 account the key will be linked to his/her account. Otherwise the user has the possibility to create a new account and link the key to it.

Sometimes it could happen that such invitation e-mails never receive their recipients (in times of over 90% spam this is no wonder). For such cases and to revoke sent out invitations you'll find the "Unredeemed Invitations" section in the collaborators dialog after sending out invitations. There you can look up the sent out key and revoke the key. By looking up the key you have the possibility to send it to the recipient yourself if the e-mail got lost.

After an invitation got redeemed, the account, which joined the map, gets listed in the "Existing collaborators" section. There you can also remove the rights of these accounts to access the map.

6.2 During collaborations

After the collaboration got set up it's possible to simultaneously work on the map. You'll recognize the online-state of other users in the middle of the top menu bar. The number of collaborators will replace the text "Currently not collaborating". To show a list of the collaborators currently online click on the magnifiying glass icon besides the info text. The list will show the name of the collaborators as well as their assigned highlighting color (changes they do will flash up with this color) and a link to call them via Skype if they've configured their Skype accounts (see following tip).

Tip: In the settings dialog (wrench icon in the top right) you can enter your Skype account. For users who entered their Skype account, the online collaborators list will show a special link besides the username, which starts a Skype call to this user.

Editing the map itself during the collaboration works exactly the same way as without collaborators. Just do your changes - but this time all the others will see them within seconds. The same way you will see what the others change. Such changes are indicated by colored highlighting boxes after a change was done. Which color applies to which user can be seen in the online collaborators list.

As already mentioned in section 3.8, when talking about undo and redo, it, of course, could happen that conflicts appear while working on the same map simultaneously. For example somebody could delete a node you're just about to edit - or that two collaborators edit the same node at the same time. In the latter case it depends on the order in which the collaborators press apply and in which order the server receives the changes. The later change will be the winning one. If user A would edit the text to "Hello" and user B would edit it to "World" but presses apply a little bit later, the server will first receive the text "Hello", which then will be replaced again by the value "World". So just don't be surprised if a node suddenly hasn't the text you just entered or moves around and similar issues.