I was pointed to a pretty new cool piece of software at the MVP Summit by our own Johan van Mierlo, called Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards).
They were recently acquired by Microsoft for their great piece of software that analyzes your inbox and gives you feed back on the number of messages sent, replied, the best time to contact the person based on the time they sent messages, etc. all from an easy to use interface. It also has a great search tool as well. I was a huge fan of Lookout before it too was acquired by Microsoft and it still performs better than Live Desktop search and Outlooks own search, Xobni even out performs Lookout,which is still available at places like here, but needs some tweaking to work with Outlook 2007.
Installing the software is pretty easy. Just agree to the EULA.
And choose where to install it. Xobni takes up just 7.48MB of storage and requires that you shut down Outlook if you have it open.
It installs checking to see if you have the .NET framework installed and takes a few minutes.
After that it will launch Outlook.
When Outlook relaunches Xobni has a flash video introduction to the product.
On the right hand side of your inbox Xobni resides. It take about 10-25 minutes for it to search through your inbox and create a fast store of all your inbox data. Don't worry even though it slows down your inbox while its building its just a one time process.
When its done you are ready to use it.
When not in use you can hide it away on your side bar to maximize your view of your emails. Yes, if you zoom in my inbox reads 2157...I get a bit of email after 3 email filters for spam.
Designed to improve your Outlook productivity by allowing you to organize, search, and navigate your email. Everytime you read an email it will bring up stats on that person like received and sent mail, time the are in their office (or out on the road) when they send their email.
It also tracks Conversations, People in that contacts network (linked by email), as well as Files sent and received by that individual. Within each of these categories you can expand it and search within for an even more granular search. The Xobni Contact bar also allows you to add a contact picture(something I wish it would have done automatically by using the picture from Outlook contacts, maybe in a future version) from pictures sent or on your computer.
It will even grab a phone number from an email even though it may be wrong. If you mouse over it, the source of the phone number will be shown. If you have phone number in the Office field in Outlook contacts this will be displayed.
If a number isn't there or the number shown isn't correct you can correct it. From that number you can call them with Skype, if you have it installed. I can see future tie-ins with Communication Server or other SIP desktop clients. Right now there is no way to configure this.
The search functionality is so fast that I have disabled Windows Vista index search, which still works fine from the Start/Run box (just not as fast) and uninstalled my desktop search engines. Xobni is really fast!
The system requirements to run it are as follows:
I had no problem running it on a my Fujitsu P1610 with 2GB of RAM.
If you get alot of email this is a program that will help you manage them. Xobni Analytics is a great tool for helping you to manage your email and relationships as well as managing how you use your email. Now only if it will help me reach Inbox=0.
To learn more about Xobni head here. To sign up for the beta head here.
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