Video Introduction
In this brief video introduction from the Comapping team, you can get an idea of exactly what the tool can do:
Features
Comapping allows up to twenty people to collaborate together on mind maps directly through their web browser. This makes for a great chance to get your whole team involved in putting together a presentation or proposal, and it is even possible to create to-do lists and assign tasks to members of your group.
The key feature of Comapping is its simplicity. This is the kind of tool that anyone can get to grips and put into action the space of a few minutes. The main menu has the usual formatting features that you would expect, and from there adds some others specific to the mind mapping process:
These include the ability to start or delete new topics and subtopics within your mind map, place icons besides your text to quickly index its contents, change the zoom level of the map your are currently looking at, and add task information, which can be sent out by email to collaborators.
Beyond the simple authoring process, which is updated in real time, and can be worked on simultaneously by collaborators, Comapping also offers basic presentation facilities. By taking screenshots of particular state of your mind map - on which the branches are expandable and collapsible - Comapping will create slides for you, which can then be played through in sequence should you wish to present your mind map sequentially to guest viewers.
It's also possible to import and export your maps to the popular Mindmanager application, and you can also import and export to RTF for word documents and HTML for a web page with bullets.
This is a nice addition, for while I like the idea of using Comapping as a presentation tool, I think it is much better suited to planning, and lacks something in the way of visual punch to be considered as a serious presentation delivery tool, considering the vast range of options available tailored specifically to this purpose, such as SPresent and Zentation.
Room For Improvement
Given that Comapping does foreground presentations, it would be great to see at least export functionality for PowerPoint and / or Keynote, as is present in other mind mapping applications, such as NovaMind. Certainly, it doesn't take a great deal of time to transform a bulleted Word document into a PowerPoint deck, but for sake of convenience I would like to see this option added down the line.
Furthermore, it would be nice to see the possibility of changing the left-to-right layout to the classic radial mind map format. The Comapping team do make a note of the decision to change this aspect of mind mapping, and claim that it is founded on solid research into the efficacy of their approach, but die-hard mind mappers are likely to disagree, and claim that the radial layout is in fact central to the mind mapping experience.
I would also like to see a bigger range of images, or image import capabilities, as mind maps are by their very nature visual aids to brainstorming and memory recall. As it is, Comapping presents something very much between outlining software and mind mapping, but doesn't fit neatly into either camp.
Pricing and Specs
For Comapping viewers the service is free to use. Those who want editing capabilities can make use of a 30 day free trial, after which the service costs a very affordable $11.99 for six months access.
As Comapping is browser-based, and makes use of the Flash plug in, it should run from any browser that supports this plug in, which means that you can collaborate between Windows PCs, Macs and even Linux machines.
You can create unlimited Comaps using the service.
Conclusions
Comapping is a very simple browser-based tool for quickly and easily collaborating on your ideas, and even building basic presentations with.
Allowing up to twenty people to work together in brainstorming sessions, I can see the service being of real use for those looking to tap into the valuable resource of other points of view while putting together projects, proposals and presentations.
The service is incredibly affordable, and while it would be nice to see a couple of extra features - such as the ability to export presentations to PowerPoint - Comapping could well prove to be a great springboard for your ideas, and for pooling them with a team of collaborators.
Well worth taking a look at.
Additional Resources
If you would like to learn more about Comapping, you might want to take a look at the following links:
