Your group has been tapped to come up with a new process. How do you effectively record and organize your team's ideas in those critical first meetings?

A high-tech way could be to use OpenOffice Draw to make circles, boxes and text that are strung together with connectors. You might also capture everything in a flat text tree structure. That makes cross relationships difficult, especially between an idea at the top and some far flung one way down at the bottom.

The no-tech way would be to draw pictures on those giant Post-It notes and stick them around the room. Then somebody still has to redraw and organize them into some logical electronic document.

Nope, there's an easier way to record your brainstorm, using your laptop and a program called Freemind. Freemind is a mind mapping program that is intuitive and quick to use.

Next: Get Ready For The (Brain)storm »