Xobni beta goes public: a 'must' download for Outlook users

Great news from VentureBeat: Xobni, an Outlook add-on, is now in a public beta. James got a hands-on look at it recently and shot me a beta invite last week. Since I've just rebuilt my Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium with Vista, I only just installed Xobni to work with Outlook 2007. In just a short few days, I can already share my belief that Xobni is a must download for Outlook users.

The application quickly indexes your mailbox and then shares useful information in sidebar as you view your mail. Using a smaller-screened device, I like how the sidebar extends and contracts as needed, just like the To-Do Bar. I should also point out that Xobni works with your mail regardless of the back-end solution you use. James uses Microsoft Exchange as did I, but I've migrated over to Google's Gmail with IMAP. Xobni analyzes your mail regardless because it's indexing the local mail store from what I can see.

Using Xobni, you'll see basic information such as how many e-mails you've traded with people, what time of day they came in, etc... More importantly, you can see contact e-mails in threads to help you navigate through conversations with ease. I'm only hitting the tip of the iceberg to get you curious; while some folks may install it and shrug, I suspect the majority will be very impressed. Look over the features, give it a go and let us know what you think.

Comments

[James Kendrick]

Wow, that many emails? You'd think I'd at least get a ranking with that many.

[Kevin C. Tofel]

I took that screencap before everything was fully indexed. Have no fear: you were #1 when all was said and done. ;) Dave Zatz and Matt Miller rounded out the top 3.

[Gert Jan van Harten]

Hiya,

Just installed Xobni, been using it fairly heavily on my huge inbox consisting of 5 email messages. Anyway... I've got 10 invites left, if you guys from JKontherun want to redistribute them under readers, just redirect them to me somehow, because I don't think Xobni allows me to forward the invite managment to someone else :S

[bobm]

I got a beta invite from another person and tried it on my outlook 2007. I found it to be really interesting but the memory footprint was pushing 250+M, not bad but since I use XP in a VM (one VM per client, makes life and separation of work much easier) I was getting resource bound.

I find that Outlook 2007 has a massive footprint compared to 2003 and think that Xobni would have been much nicer if I didn't stupidly upgrade.

I do have > 100,000 emails in my archive and that may have accounted for the footprint. Someday I'll reinstall on a smaller dataset and see what happens.

Note that I am planning on someday knocking back my retention to < 10 years but everytime I think it's time I have some request that makes me spider back in time to get information about some long dead project.

[Regular Reader]

Xobni works great for me. Love it already!

[stephen]

Have been using it for a number of weeks.Is very useful so I recommend it.

However does use up more resources. It can be turned off though once installed & indexed so doesnt need to be on all the time. I contacted Xobni & got the instructions:

You can disable it by going to Tools > Trust-Center > Add-ins , click GO to go to the COM-addins screen, and disable Xobni. Follow the same procedure to re-enable Xobni.