Hands-on with Xobni: make Outlook more productive, social

Morshad published 07 May 2008, 16:06 in software - 203 views

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Admit it: you're treading water in the same sea of e-mail as the rest of us. Plenty of products from Gmail to Apple Mail purport to toss us a life preserver with better organization and search features, and a new plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, called Xobni, claims that it can help you "organize your flooded inbox." It even offers contact management and discovery features, some of which led Bill Gates to call Xobni "the next generation of social networking." Xobni's been in private beta until this week, so Ars Technica waded out into treacherous e-mail waters with Xobni to see if it helps us to stay afloat.

Installed as a plug-in for Office 2003 or 2007 on XP and Vista, Xobni functions as a sort of contextual sidebar assistant that displays relevant information about each message and its sender, or a currently selected contact. I use only two fairly active accounts in Outlook, and Xobni's initial scan of my e-mail didn't take noticeably long at all.

At the top of the Xobni sidebar is a search panel that allows you to find contacts from your inbox and message folders, or search your address book. Just below is an "e-mail analytics" panel that displays activity of the sender over the past 24 hours, followed by a metadata dashboard that sniffs out contact information from the current message. Below these panels is a "Network" area that shows every person the current sender has sent messages to (combed from the messages in your inbox), as well as a Conversations panel that brings the popular new message aggregation paradigm to Outlook. At the bottom of the main Xobni sidebar panel is a "Files Exchanged" area which, as you might imagine, offers quick access to all the files you've exchanged with the currently selected contact.

News source: Ars Technica

Tags: Xobni, Outlook, E-mail

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