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Saturday, June 07, 2008

Xobni my new inboX

I am loving it and this is no commercial for McDonalds. The history of the product is synonymous with serendipity similar to Flickr. The company started off building an analytics tool for MS Exchange and due to privacy concerns converted it to desktop productivity tool.


What is Xobni? (BTW, Xobni is reverse of Inbox)

Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments.

I have been using this for almost over a month now and I am impressed. What do I like the most about this - search search and search! The primate search that comes with Outlook is no better than lousy *yawwwnnnnn*.

Here is what I like:
Every selection of an email shows the details of the email - emails exchanged with sender, sender's "network" basically who else the person has been ccing (nothing privy), and files exchanged (two extra candies for this).
It also tells what the sender's rank is. In other words, how big a fan the sender is.
A graphical presentation of what times of the days the emails have been exchanged.
Search is BIG. Search not only searches current mails but archived ones too, did I say I like the search.
This is what is there for instant gratification but if you are the statistics and graphs kind of a person then select from menu "Xobni Analytics" and voila you get all kinds of analytics to dig your email behavior and productivity. Be prepared for some surprises here.

Now, what I don't like:
Two things, when the Xobni companion is visible it drags Outlook to a craaaawwwlllllll. Not good, defeats the purpose.
Secondly, while using three column Outlook interface the companion eats most of third column. This is little annoyance but it isn't that bad either.

1 comments:

Sumit Awasthi said...

I tried Xobni. Slowed down my computer. Not worth the hassle. Also added too much color to my Outlook window...drew too much attention in an otherwise conservative office.