May
6
Written by:
Don Worthley
5/6/2008 12:01 PM
I received my invite to the Xobni beta from Dan Gilleland who I can see from my Xobni profile likes to send me messages right at 7 or 10 AM. You know, that's great information to know if I'm planning on calling Dan out of the blue to talk.
Xobni (pronounced Zob knee) installs as a side-bar in Outlook and the best way to describe it is a social networking, personal data miner, productivity enhancement, or an SNPDMPE. The tool indexed my oversized pst file in less than 30 minutes and I was up and running in no time.
The side-bar makes it easy to quickly find
- Contact Info - Xobni automatically parses the contents of your email messages looking for phone numbers, email addresses and other contact information. This information is then easy to see at the top of a profile.
- Contacts (Dan's Network) - pulled through the email threads you've exchanged with Dan or where Dan was listed either as a CC or a BCC
- Conversations - View a list of all past conversations, both outgoing and incoming.
- Files Exchanged - Quickly view a list of all files exchanged with Dan in one easy to find list.
One of the great features of Xobni is the built in search indexing which makes looking up information really fast. Yes, I realize there are two great search products our there from Microsoft and Google, but Xobni combines the search interface with social networking and other productivity enhancements in a way that's intuitive and easy to learn.
Another great feature is the analytics interface1 which will no doubt cause a slight drain in productivity when the millions of slightly OCD technophiles see this for the first time.
My hat's off to David and the other UX guys at Xobni for creating a product that takes an amazing amount of data and presents it in an way that's intuitive and highly discoverable.
1
With the Xobni anlytics tool, you can slice and dice your email database in thousands of different ways and the most amazing aspect of the interface is the speed. Basically, this is a BI portal for your inbox. Fun Fun Fun!
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4 comment(s) so far...
Hi Don -- That's a pretty cool addon for Outlook, but I wish they had a version for Mozilla Thunderbird. However, it could be useful for corporate use, since many of the technology-centric companies are blogging like there is no tomorrow.
I think I'll give it a try at work, and then maybe keep up with the internet social scene a bit easier. =)
By John Tyra on
6/18/2008 9:22 PM
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Thanks for the comment John. I've found it useful to help me keep track of customer emails. With new customers each each week, it's hard to keep track of everyone, but I've found that with Xobni, I can see related threads quickly and see my own replies without waiting for a few minutes for Outlook to search from beginning to end through my entire pst file for the reply. You'd think they would have the pst file indexed in a way that made retrieving replies a sub-second operation!
By dworthley on
6/18/2008 10:08 PM
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Hi Don,
It sounds like you are a busier tech than myself. =) Regarding the search within outlook, I'm curious; are you using Outlook 03 or 07? I ask, because Outlook 07 running under Vista (while it has other issues) is pretty darn quick when searching for keywords and such if you can deal with the 'Desktop Search' service.
I just finished the install here at work (shhhh! Don't tell the IT guys...wait...that's me...::grin::) and on a side-note, I had to smirk at the "thanks for installing" screen within setup w/all of the devs giving a thumbs-up. On first impressions, it seems like an alternative to the MS desktop search, but I'll give it a week...who knows, maybe I'll like it better!
By John Tyra on
6/19/2008 8:23 AM
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"(shhhh! Don't tell the IT guys...wait...that's me...::grin::)" Hehe, that's one of the great things about being an "IT guy" There needs to be some perk to compensate for all the time you spent after hours keeping up with things IT.
Yeah, I'm using Office 2007, but I disabled the Desktop Search since it seemed to thrash my hard drive. I may have gotten a little impatient :). All in all, I like 2007. I did find the overall performance reading and writing to large pst file to be greatly improved in 2007.
By dworthley on
6/19/2008 9:32 AM
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