Today Mindjet, the vendor of the mind mapping application Mind Manager, today announced that it will acquire social task management company Cohuman. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mindjet also announced Mindjet Connect, a new “work management” solution that will be available Sept. 22. Both Cohuman and Mindjet Connect are software-as-a-service offerings with freemium pricing models.

“Only project managers think of projects as ‘projects,'” says Chief Prodcuts Officer Blaine Mathieu. “Everyone else thinks of it as ‘work.’ So that’s why we call it work management.” The solution is focused on document-based collaboration. Mathieu’s vision is for users to eventually use Mindjet products to manage projects from the initial ideation/brainstorming phase to planning to execution.

Execution is where the Cohuman acquisition comes in. Cohuman has a Facebook-style social network interface and lets users not only manage their own tasks but “follow” other users’ tasks. It can prioritize tasks based on how new the task is, when it is due and how many users are following it. In the near term, Cohuman will merely run alongside Mindjet Connect, but the plan is to fully integrate the two products later this year.

The free version of Mindjet Connect will include 1GB of storage. The business version will include 6GB of storage per account and will cost $45 per month for an account with three permanent members and unlimited guests. There will also be a SharePoint version that will be available within SharePoint and behind the firewall.

One big limitation to Mindjet Connect at the moment is a lack of Active Directory and/or LDAP integration (except in the SharePoint version), meaning all Mindjet Connect user management will have to be managed independently of existing enterprise access controls.

Mindjet Connect and Cohuman will compete with other document collaboration and social task management tools, including Box, Huddle, Socialcast, Teamly and Asana. Mindjet is jumping into a competitive market, but already has traction with its mind mapping tools, so that will give it a foot in the door at some organizations.

Services Angle

Cloud based collaboration tools are getting a lot of attention right now. We previously covered Forrester’s recent report on cloud-hosted mobile collaboration tools, and that report just scratches the surface of what’s going on. Mindjet’s mind mapping centeric collaboration tools are a bit different from the other options on the market, and worth a look for fans of that approach.