Brain Murmurs

The latest offering from Brain Murmurs is a system for the management of personal and collaborative tasks and projects known as Mentat. This blog entry represents the first of several articles on the Mentat system.

Introduction

Mentat is a product that I personally have been wanting to have for about five years. Although it is similar in many respects to Backpack, Basecamp, Remember The Milk, and others, Mentat provides many features and benefits that these products lack.

Background

At Brain Murmurs, our contract work and internal product development required us to use several different applications to get our work done. We used GForge for collaborative development, Omni Outliner and Circus Ponies Notebook for personal GTD-style task management, and Omni Plan for formal project management. Work with our customers also mandated that we use FogBugz, Mantis, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft OneNote.

As a result, our basic workflow consisted of defining projects in Omni Plan, tracking bugs, tasks, and feature requests in GForge, and maintaining our individual daily task lists in Notebook. As disciples of GTD, many of us also found ourselves mixing our tasks lists in Notebook to include both personal and work-related tasks. This ultimately meant that we were double booking the same information in many different places, an inefficient and frustrating process.

As an entrepreneur, I found myself using the meager notes applications available on the BlackBerry, Treo, and iPhone to jot down ideas as they came up. This was extremely unsatisfying, as it was not really possible or convenient to synchronize my notes or easily flesh them out into a Word document or wiki entry.

As a spouse, I also found myself appointed as the anointed Buyer of Groceries. I frequently used my handheld’s notes application to track whatever items I knew that my wife and I needed picked up after work. Any time that my wife needed me to pick up something from the store I’d have to write down what she wanted and transfer it to my phone after I was done talking to her.

Mentat was born out of a desire for one unified tool that would provide integrated personal and collaborative task management, project planning, and seamless remote access to notes and task data (see below). As a power user of such services, I felt it vital that one be able to take down a note on one’s handheld in the space about two seconds, and be able to access data quickly and efficiently.

Although Basecamp appears at face value to meet most of these needs, they fall short in many areas, particularly in their lack of support for task priorities or threaded comments (pretty much mandatory for any serious bug tracking or CRM tool).

Since we were unable to find something to suit our needs, we made one ourselves.

Mentat Overview

The core of Mentat is a centralized web service. Clients leverage our RESTful API set to interact with the server, create tasks, and render existing views in web browsers and a variety of native clients.

Mentat data access from various clients (iPhone project view shown).

Mentat Features

• Personal task management
• Collaborative task management
• Professional quality bug tracking system
• Professional project management system (forthcoming)
• Unified personal todo list
• Dynamic AJAX web client
• Robust mobile access
• RESTful web services API for integration with third party applications
• Email integration
• Jott Support

Personal Task Management

Each user gets a private, personal project to track as many upcoming tasks, notes, or events as they require.

Collaborative Task Management

Shared projects allow groups of people to access the same task list from around the building or the world. Tasks can be assigned to individual users and include separate descriptions and summaries, assignable priorities and threaded comments.

Professional quality bug tracking system

Mentat provides bug tracking functionality similar in most respects to GForge and FogBugz.

Professional quality project management system

(forthcoming) We will be adding a Gantt chart editor by the end of 2007. Microsoft Project import and export are also planned.

Unified Personal Todo List

The Mentat To Do page shows you all of your projects and tasks in one unified view and allows you to assign a subset of these tasks to the Mentat Short List.

The Short List lets you focus on the tasks requiring your immediate attention. The Short List allows you to assign its tasks a local priority without effecting the global, centralized priority the task was originally created with. This makes sense since item 2179 might have a very low priority in the grand scheme of things, but today it might be due today, so you assign it the highest priority in your local list without interfering with the task’s centralized project settings.

Dynamic AJAX web client

There is nothing like our web client UI, anywhere. I’m starting to hate sites that don’t have some of our features and will be discussing this in further articles.

Robust mobile access

The mobile interface is one of Mentat’s most important and compelling features.  Although the only dedicated handheld we support right now is the Apple iPhone, we will be releasing native clients for the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and J2ME platforms later this year.

The aforementioned grocery tasks are fantastic - I use my iPhone interface to add items to our Grocery project while cooking breakfast for the family, and the web browser interface to add items when my wife calls me at work. Shared project access means that she can add items to the list as well. Jott integration means that either of us can add to the list with a quick phone call (if you’ve ever taken care of multiple children under the age of four, you know what a big deal this is).

When I get to the store, I just pull out the iPhone and start closing out items as I add them to my shopping basket.

Entering new tasks is extremely easy: if I’m in a hurry all that I have to do is enter the item description and hit the ‘new’ button (the influence Twitterific has had on our design is quite apparent to me).

RESTful web services API for integration with third party applications

Although this could be used for various third party applications, we have several native handheld clients planned that will make use of these APIs. Likewise, customers have expressed interest in Microsoft Outlook and Project Server integration, so these will serve there as well.

Email integration

Email integration should be in place by the time the site goes live. We will provide one high level address for sending tasks to your personal project. Additional address can be generated for each project you are a member of to allow posting by email.

Jott Support

Although users will be able to manually configure Jott to work with Mentat, we will eventually provision Jott contacts automatically for Jott customers through their Mentat Management panel.

Hosted Service

Our hosted service will go live on September 15th, 2007.

Service Type	Price	Ads	Multiple Projects	Shared Projects
Personal	Free	Yes	No	No
Professional	$5/month	No	Yes	No
Team	$10/month	No	Yes	Yes

Stand Alone Installation

Stand alone installations for customers preferring to store their data on their own corporate IT infrastructure will be available later this fall.

Filed under: mentat by Daniel