Practicing the Black Art (08/10)
Outlook & Xobni, A Good Match
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@comcast.net
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards, but there is nothing
backward about this free plug-in module from
www.xobni.com. The more email you
receive, the more you will like and appreciate Xobni. The program works
as a data mining machine for your stored emails. Without Xobni, the best
you can do with Outlook is to organize your email by folders, messages,
and dates. With Xobni, you can organize your email by people, email
histories, and personal, social or business relationships.
You need Outlook 2003 or 2007 to use Xobni. Either XP
or Vista will work fine with the program. The folks at Xobni are also
working on versions for other email programs such as Gmail and Yahoo
Mail. How long this will take is unknown. Downloading and installation
is quick, easy, and seamless. The program requires some time to
synchronize itself with outlook. The amount of time will be determined
by the size of the email data base you have accumulated. I had slightly
over two thousand emails in eighteen different folders, and that took
about ten minutes.
If you keep a lot of information on your contacts,
it’s difficult to extract that information in a way that can be useful
with Outlook. All that changes once Xobni is installed. Changes begin
with an attractive panel that sits on the right side of your Outlook
screen and doesn’t infringe or interfere with any of Outlook’s standard
functions. The panel interface slides open when you need it, and
discretely closes when you don’t.
You get two options within this panel. The first
brings up a blank email which is nice. For you organizational types, the
second option lets you send meeting requests. A real time saver is the
simultaneous display of open time slots that Xobni drags from your
Outlook calendar.
Your contact profiles display at the top of the Xobni
panel with pictures if one is in the profile. That’s followed by the
phone number and a thread of any conversations you’ve had along with
files you’ve exchanged. Specifics topics are quickly found with Xobni’s
search tool, and there is a handy slider that exposes or hides lines of
email text. While it appears you could be getting bogged down in
details, the material is organized so that navigating through the
information is an easy, pleasant journey filled with discovery.
Skype’s VoIP service integrates with PC, Xobni quite
well. A mouse click on a phone number within a Xobni profile generates a
SkypeOut call.
You can use Xobni for simple searches within Outlook,
and Xobni searching is lightning fast in comparison. That’s probably
because it’s integrated within Outlook rather than running on top of it
like most third party applications. Xobni gives you more than express
searching. It organizes social information logically with additional
functions that Outlook simply can’t match. How often have you given up
searching with Outlook because the program lacks even the simplest logic
for intelligent searching?
Instead of treating mail conversations, contacts and calendars as
separate entities, Xobni weaves them together in a responsive, intuitive
interface. It’s hard to go wrong with this tool. Go to
www.Xobni.com and
get started.
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Copyright 2008. This article is from the October 2008 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
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The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members
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See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC
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