Concept Draw Office is not your typical office suite. Don’t think of word processing, spreadsheets and databases but rather unique ways to present information that helps you make decisions, keep track of projects visually and present your case visually to clients and people in other departments.
Concept Draw Office is divided into three separate programs that can work together or separately. Mindmap, Concept Draw Pro and Project.
At this time Mindmap was the most useful to me. I have been working on a project that started as a personal blog I wanted to discover a niche better and has not grown into a new division of my company. If you not familiar with the concept of a “mindmap” is basically a visual way to break down ideas and organize them. A mindmap is often used in creativity an innovation exercises. It usually starts off with a central idea like for instance, photography and from there you can literally draw out and link subdivisions out from the large idea get more detailed as you branch out. I have worked on several different software versions of this kind of thing in the past but this one seem to work the smoothest for me so far. By nature I am a very big picture person and this is a tool the forces me to think more detailed and as a visual person I appreciate the visual representation of ideas in a mindmap.
Concept Draw Pro is an excellent tool for creating quick illustrations for business documents from flow charts, maps, business diagrams like comparison charts, organizational charts, project management, technical drawings and more via a library of scalable vector graphics that look very professional. Many of the illustrations look like things I have seen in books and magazines.
The final part of the software suite was called, Project. Project is a way to visually organize your projects with time table and individuals responsible. One really cool thing you can do is import a mindmap you laid out visually and it will automatically create and fill in the part of your project with fields for how long it should take, start times, etc.
When I first started trying out this software package my initial reaction was it looked neat and was fun to play with but I thought it was too much for what it did or I thought it did. However as a small business owner who is constantly looking for ways to organize our business better it worth considering the cost of the time you would spend creating the graphics and charts with other tools. The total suite is $499. Separately the individual pieces are priced as follows; ConceptDraw Pro – $249, ConceptDraw MINDMAP – $199 and ConceptDraw Project – $199. If you buy the Suite you save almost $150 and considering how each part works together it’s worth considering buying the entire suite. People who would find this suite useful are web designers, project managers, illustrators for print and web publications, engineering firms, I.T. Departments and audio and video producers among others.
The ConceptDraw web site has some great animations of how the suite works together. It’s worth taking a look just to see how information that is often perceived as boring or tedious can be quickly represented and conversly how visual concepts can be translated to smart project list. A sample of what can be quickly acheived can be found on their site gallery. if you are interested in trying it out and think it may be a good tool for your business then consider downloading a trial version.
Review by – J. Patrick Greer Greenville MUG Member and co-owner of SpinningSilk, LLC.
