As many of you know the latest release of Compendium, V. 1.5.2, while having many powerful new features, took a wrong turn with respect to Exporting outlines of maps for preparing meeting notes documents in Word.

Michelle Bachler, our beloved Compendium programmer at the Open University, has created a special version of Compendium which fixes the Outline Export problem.  This is not an official Compendium Institute release -- it has not been tested enough to qualify for that.  But it's good enough to be an "alpha" release, which means those of us who are either technically savvy or desperate enough can use it.  :-)

Here's the link to the link to download and install the new Compendium 1.5.3-Alpha1:
http://www.cognexus.org/alpha_version.htm
Please note the left column comment:  Michelle has asked that I collect any bug reports for now so that she can stay focused on the funded work.

The key feature of the Alpha1 version is a checkbox to "Optimize for Word" the HTML outline output.  I will be posting instructions and a new format "template" for creating the kind of compact Word outlines that I have been promoting for years.  The new instructions will appear on the Compendium page ( http://www.cognexus.org/id66.htm) as soon as they are ready.  I'll also send a short note to this list.

Although this is an "alpha" version, I have used it for several weeks as my production version of Compendium without any problems.  I think it's very solid ... and elegant!

Please send me a note if you install the Alpha1 release and let me know about your experience with the new outline export!

Yours,
Jeff

Dr. Jeff Conklin
CogNexus Institute ... Collaborative Display, Collective Intelligence
http://cognexus.org   Phone: +1-707-256-3425  Fax: +1-707-256-3903
1037 Juarez St., Napa, CA  94559    USA