What is Xobni?

Xobni is a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, so if your not an Outlook user, it’s time to move on (sorry). More importantly here is what Xobni does:

• Search you email (really fast)
• Get analysis about your emails
• Get contact information
• Quickly find attachments
• It’s FREE!

Everyday I get dozens and dozens of emails that I have to save from vendors, clients etc. I do my best to both automatically and manually file these into Outlook folders but sometimes even that is not enough. I “know” I filed that email but I still could not find it. Outlooks built in search (at least in Outlook 2003) is OK, but it’s really slow. With Xobni I can simply start to type a few letters of what I’m searching for and “poof” search result start to come up. You can also easily search for anything. It could be a persons last name, a part number, etc.

Once you have completed your search the real magic of Xobni starts. Xobni will return the search results in five sections. The first part of the search results is the analysis. It will show you a histogram of when you receive emails from this contact. While this may just seem “cute” at first knowing when you receive email from someone may help you know when the best time to reply to them (and they will read it). Next to the histogram Xobni will display the contacts picture from their Linkedin profile (if they have one). I deal with a lot of people only by email or phone so it’s kind of nice to have a “face” to go with the voice/name.

The second section in the search results are contact information. Xobni will automatically parse the signatures of incoming emails and extract telephone numbers and other contact information. I’ve totally stopped updating my “contacts” information in Outlook and I totally rely on the information from Xobin. If I need to call someone and I dont’ know their telephone number I just use the search feature to quickly retrieve it.

“Network” is the third section of search results. I have absolutely no idea how it comes up with this list but the results are sometimes pretty amazing. The network contains a list of contact that you have in common with this contact. I’m assuming this is extracted from CC’s on the emails but the results are still pretty amazing.

The last two sections of search results are the real bread and butter of Xobni. The contain conversations and files exchanged. The conversations contains email threads that you’ve had with this contact sorted by date. This lets me easily find a particular email (or thread of emails) from this contact. Once you’ve found the email or thread that you are looking for you can click on it and you’ll get a summary of all the messages in the thread. From there you can open the mail, reply to it or forward it.

Files exchanged is similar to the conversations except it shows you all the attachments that you have exchanged with this contact. I use this feature when I know someone sent me an attachment but I can’t remember when. Once you have searched for the contact you can easily scroll through the list of attachments and find it.

Xobni is not going to solve all of your problems. It does not organize or file your mail. It doesn’t make your coffee or clean windows. What it does (and I think it does it very well) is help you find what your looking for in the (admin it) huge stash of email that your collecting every day.

If your like most of us at Doreo you read a lot of blogs. Rather than actually go and check each blog daily we use RSS readers. We’ve tired lots of them (both stand alone apps and web based). We all finally settled on one that we like Google Reader.

Google Reader has all the features that I want:

• Web Based (I work on at least 3 different machines)
• The ability to categorize blogs
• Lots of plug-ins to make it more useful/extend it

The plug-in part was a bit of a stretch, but you’ll see in a second. I normally browse the web with FireFox. FireFox actually has the plug-ins that make Google Reader work great.

The first plug-in is Smart Google Reader Subscribe Button. This is a awesome little tool. Instead of having to hunt all over a blog to find the RSS feed it puts a little RSS icon on the top right of the web page. If you are already subscribed the RSS icon has a check mark on it. The plug-in requires GreaseMonkey, but that is whole different post about the net things you can do with GreaseMonkey.

The second great plug-in is Google Reader Notified Firefox Extension. This litte guy will sit down in your FireFox status bar. When there is a new post on one of the blogs that your subscribed to it’s icon will change and it will show you (with a number) how many unread posts there are.