Visualising Data

Unlike most of the things I recommend, this one is pricey (US$1800 to get the full version) but immensely powerful. Tableau is a data visualisation tool with a fundamentally different approach to all the dashboards and reporting packages you may have used in the past. Rather than focussing on pulling data together in a contructive and easy to understand manner (which is essentially the proposition with Crystal Reports or Pentaho or ...), Tableau is all about discovering the hidden and unexpected value in your data through visualisation and manipualtion. Have a look at the example gallery for some of the creative ways this is being used - I would share some of my own examples, but they are far too proprietary to the clients I have been servicing :) but they include benchmarking (derive a profile of required Birkman scores for a role, compare candidates, instant visual matching) and geographic contact mapping (how many of each type of contact do we have in each UK postcode area, all displayed on a map of the UK). Connects to anything from a .csv text file to industrial-strength data-warehouses, and most of the database servers in between.

Huddle

After many clunky false starts from the good and the great, online collaboration actually works now - try Huddle (huddle.net). The feature set is already good, and I know from talking to the London-based team who are making waves with this tool that the best is yet to come, including a developer API. iCal and Facebook integration are just the latest additions...

(The basic one-huddle package is free - and if you are a Charity, you can apply for a free corporate account with fifty huddles...)

A couple of Brainy Tools - I: MindManager Pro

I discovered MindManager about 18 months ago and wouldn't try sorting out my thoughts about a project without it now. Good integration with Office and Acrobat (ie it can import and export to Word, Powerpoint etc and export to pdf) and even supports live links to SQL Server databases if you are really geeky. For the average user it is just a highly intelligent blank sheet upon which to doodle - which is what makes it invaluable.