I’d be very interested in your SharePoint Integration concepts. I’d beta test, if it would help.

Thanks,
Rob Schmidt

You are right – they all have their drawbacks. Seven Sigma is working on some SharePoint integration which should improve this, but we do it in between consulting work so its not a project with a budget. I have a password protected site where all my clients maps are exported to in web format, and many of my clients install Compendium and I send them the zipped XML.

You may not be aware, but if you export an XML zipped, you can then just drag that zip file to a compendium map, choose “process as XML zipped” and it will import automagically (much less cumbersom than using the menus).

regards

Paul

My question: How do you work around the print / results distribution limitations with Compendium? I’ve tried exporting as Web Outlines, Web Maps, and JPGs (importing into PDF and distributing as PDF). All of these techniques have their drawbacks:
1. Maps are often big (Yes, I need to break down into smaller maps).
2. Have Mac (non-IE users).
3. Need to easily update and post results to SharePoint from dialogue mappings. These techniques take a while and can make a little difficult to post.

Thanks,
Rob Schmidt

Congratulations! Your readers have submitted and voted for your blog at The Daily Reviewer. We compiled an exclusive list of the Top 100 sharepoint Blogs, and we are glad to let you know that your blog was included! You can see it at http://thedailyreviewer.com/top/sharepoint

You can claim your Top 100 Blogs Award here : http://thedailyreviewer.com/pages/badges/sharepoint

P.S. This is a one-time notice to let you know your blog was included in one of our Top 100 Blog categories. You might get notices if you are listed in two or more categories.

P.P.S. If for some reason you want your blog removed from our list, just send an email to angelina@thedailyreviewer.com with the subject line “REMOVE” and the link to your blog in the body of the message.

Cheers!

Angelina Mizaki
Selection Committee President
The Daily Reviewer
http://thedailyreviewer.com

Firstly I have a read a lot of your material and your knowledge in this area scares the hell out of me, I when I see you replying to one of my posts, my first reaction is to think “oh crap what did I do wrong”

In relation to Compendium and its strengths and weaknesses, I really wanted to do the topic of Compendium and Debategraph justice, but it would have taken over the entire article, so I will save it till when I write up a case study of this ongoing project that I am working on.

In relation to the integration of Compendium and Debategraph, I will send you a link directly to examine, as I have been doing this out of necessity already.

Thanks again for your feedback

Paul

Another exceptionally valuable post. From my standpoint as a researcher into the practice of creating and facilitating collaborative sensemaking groups, you provide some very rich and insightful examples that I might want to cite in my own work.
A couple of notes on your comments about Compendium and DebateGraph. On the technical level, we designed Compendium from the start (mid-1990s) to be open and shareable on multiple levels. Being able to exchange data, especially tagged/linked/typed (as in node types) data, with other applications in such a way as to preserve the value-added from one tool to another, is built into Compendium’s DNA. We intended it from the start to be a way of doing the parts of the overall value chain of creating meaning that other tools didn’t do, but also to be able to take from and send to those other tools (not necessarily discourse-mapping tools, either; we originally developed Compendium to be part of the expert systems modeling and development lifecycle) in all sorts of ways. So to me, what DebateGraph enables and what Compendium enables are complementary. For example, Jack Park is doing at least part of his PhD work on mechanisms to exchange IBIS data between these and other tools. Further, given the advances in software technology, embedding Compendium maps in DebateGraph, and vice versa, is just a small matter of implementation away.

The installation issues with Compendium are acknowledged. We made a conscious decision some years back to concentrate on features that allow rich authoring and customization — power tool capabilities — rather than what would have lent itself to a quick start / new user type of approach. We were power users ourselves and wanted a tool that would let us go as far and wide as we could. As such the tool is more of a rich desktop application, not lightweight, nor does it yet live comfortably on the web. Other tools occupy that space and we are actively working to link up with them.

Compendium in its current form, though far from perfect, does exceed many of our wildest dreams from the early days. The forthcoming Compendium 2.0 will go even farther on a number of axes, including the groupware dimension, among others. But to me the main point for Compendium itself, as software, is still to occupy a point along the spectrum that others don’t, and continue to build more ways to connect with those others. Or to say it more economically, we never saw it as an either/or, but as a both/and.

As a mapper, I’ll also say that there are many ways to craft maps in Compendium that can make them more compact and browseable (and work better when exported to HTML) then the example you show in the post. IBIS per se does not really provide nor prescribe how to do this, and there are many approaches and styles that can be used to share an information architecture for a set of maps that incorporate all sorts of information-organization approaches. We built many capabilities into Compendium that go beyond what is necessary to create IBIS-type maps, precisely with this idea in mind. Compendium is more of a full-fledged hypermedia authoring tool than an IBIS tool per se, though we have kept IBIS in our sights from the beginning as well.

Al