Review: Xobni Extends Outlook's View, But at a Cost

Outlook is a well-established presence on the business desktop, providing millions with their email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. Information technology's such an establishment, in fact, that when Microsoft radically revamped the Office suite's interface in 2007, information technology left Outlook largely unchanged.

Although information technology'south big and sluggish, there's no denying that Outlook does what it'due south supposed to practise. Non quickly or with style, only consistently and effectively nonetheless. The affair is, though, that we have moved beyond simply electronic mail as our major grade of business communication. In the increasingly real-time and social world, a big ol' email client seems a trivial… old-fashioned.

Xobni is an attempt to bring Outlook into sync with the socially-networked earth. Available in a free and paid "Plus" versions (the paid version offers advanced search capabilities and agenda functions), Xobni adds a new pane to your Outlook window packed with information about the sender of any electronic mail you're currently viewing or the contact you've selected.

Working with Xobni

The epitome to the right is what Xobni looks like on my organization. I've selected one of my own emails from the "Sent Mail" folder and obscured some of my personal information, of course.

At the top is a "concern card" view with my phone numbers and email addresses, also equally my title and the company I work for. Below that is a graph of how many emails I've sent and received to and from this contact (which is me, which may be why the numbers are odd), but that's just the default – the v buttons above that nautical chart allow me to select different functions. If I click the orange button, I get deportment I can perform relating to the contact – make an appointment or send an email, in this case. The other three buttons open the contact'southward LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profile. (Y'all can pick and choose several social network functions – other options that I did non choose are buttons for Skype and Hoovers company search.)

• LinkedIn gives you lot their location, current visitor and title, and number of connections, plus a link to their total contour.
• Facebook gives y'all your contact'south "Wall" and a link to their profile.
• Twitter gives y'all your contact'southward status updates, plus buttons to view their profile and follow them – you an besides post updates through Xobni, though it's far from a replacement for a full-featured Twitter client.

Basically, the top of the Xobni window is devoted to information nearly your contact. The side by side part is about your human relationship with that contact.  The "Network" office is the most mysterious to me; according to their website, Xobni analyzes the "From:", "To:", and "CC:" fields of incoming emails to determine who amongst your contacts the sender also has some connection to. For example, if I have the CEO and the CFO of a company in my accost book, and I get an email from the CFO that's CC'ed to the CEO, Xobni knows that the 2 are continued.

"Conversations" condenses all my previous exchanges with that contact into threaded discussions. Click on a word and you can read the letters in the thread, run into who was involved in the chat, and pull out any files exchanged. (You lot can too hover the pointer over a discussion and a pop-up will preview the first few messages in the thread.) A slider at the acme allows you to motility from the start line or two of each message to full letters. Click a message in the thread and the message itself opens in the Xobni bar, with buttons to respond or forward, or to open up in an Outlook window.

Finally, "Files Exchanged" is what it sounds similar – a listing of every attachment the contact has ever sent you or that yous've sent to them.

At the very top of the Xobni window is the search bar, assuasive you lot to search both contacts and email messages. The results are broken into 5 categories: People (contacts with your search term in their name, company name, e-mail accost, etc.), Messages (any email with your search term in it), Files Exchanged (any attachment with your search term in the filename), Appointments (any engagement that includes your search term; this is technically a "Plus" feature – clicking an appointment returned in search in the free version volition open an upgrade pitch), and Tasks (again, any task with your search term in it).

Verdict: Is Xobni useful?

Xobni helps uncover a neat deal of information, most only non all of which is particularly useful. I can't imagine what use it would be to know that a particular contact tends to email me in the afternoon more than than the morning, but it'south kind of interesting to await at. The social networking features are the near useful part, I recollect – already I've discovered profiles for and added on LinkedIn and Twitter a client that I've just started working with.

Much of the usefulness of Xobni is hampered past the fact that, like Outlook itself, information technology's fairly slow and resource-intensive. For instance, information technology took nearly a minute hovering my mouse over a discussion with 24 messages in it for the popular-up to populate with bulletin previews! Searching takes significantly longer than Google Desktop'south Outlook plugin – and even longer than searching the whole desktop from the Google Desktop sidebar.

At present, that could have just been my PC – it's a few years quondam, with a 2.four GHz Athlon x64, a gigabyte of memory, and Windows XP with Office 2007. Inappreciably a speed demon! But a search for "Xobni" on Twitter reveals that I'chiliad hardly alone in finding Xobni too dull. Here'due south a sample of messages just from the concluding couple of hours:

• "all xobni did for me was sloooooow down outlook. didn't keep information technology long."
• "installed xobni… over again… we will run across if my laptop can handle it this time"
• "I had xobni. it'south heavy, and non really effective or accurate. had many issues with that."
• "Xobni is a Really good product but occasionally it stalls outlook for a while."
• "my biggest problem comes when I try to read the conversation between some of my contacts with xobni."

To be fair, in that location are positive mentions, too, like this 1 from an plainly pleased user:

• "I've been using Xobni since effectually Feb. 2009. Kind of hooked on it. "

(Incidentally, the Xobni team is quite active on Twitter; comments about Xobni are oftentimes replied to by @xobni within minutes!)

Xobni creates its own index of your electronic mail, so it definitely needs a lot of resources. It is possible that it'southward not Xobni'southward mistake that it tends to be boring – perhaps Outlook, as big and ponderous as it is, only isn't a practiced platform for 3rd-party applications – but it is Xobni'southward problem. While it provides some useful data and functionality, especially related to social networking, none of the information it provides is worth waiting for, particularly if I can get the same information quicker just by Googling it.

People with older machines — or lower-end new machines — but aren't going to become much out of Xobni. If you have a more than powerful computer, though, Xobni might well be worthwhile. Fast searching, threaded discussions, and social networking interface all make Xobni a useful product, provided you don't spend fourth dimension waiting for it to respond.

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/review-xobni-extends-outlooks-view-but-at-a-cost.html

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