Office Open XML enables round-trip interoperability between Word 2007 and Mindjet's MindManager

MindManager Pro 7 is a visual outliner from Mindjet that "enables companies and individuals to work smarter, think creatively and save time by revolutionizing the way they visually capture and manage information." In this screencast, Mindjet's Michael Scherotter demonstrates a solution that deeply integrates a MindManager map with Word 2007.

When this solution exports a map to a Word file -- in Open XML format -- there are two levels of integration with Word. First, the contents of the map are rendered as XML. Second, mechanisms for interacting with the map are added to a new tab on the Word ribbon. MindManager has a notion of tasks, for example, with associated names and dates. These carry over to the MindManager tab on Word's ribbon, where the same kinds of interaction are supported by Word macros. Because the macros are included in the Word file, it's stored as a .docm (macro-enabled) file, rather than simply a .docx (XML) file.

Word users can not only interact with the map, they can also reflect their changes back to MindManager users. This round-trip interoperability is accomplished entirely with XSLT transformations in both directions. The solution itself is a C# add-in to MindManager.