About.com Rating

The Bottom Line

Xobni puts emails in context: previous conversations with a sender, their key contacts and files exchanged, all put alongside emails as you view them in Outlook or available via fast search.
As great as Xobni is at contextualizing messages and tying them to people, it would be great if it also guided you to the most important messages.

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Pros

• Xobni lets you browse emails and attachments by contact and read conversations in context

• Fast search finds contacts, attachments and messages while typing
• Xobni finds connections between people and is smart about identifying multiple email addresses

Cons

• Xobni could help identify important emails
• The Xobni bar is only available in the main Outlook window
• Xobni relies only on the frequency of email exchange to discern importance

Description

• Xobni indexes your Outlook emails to provide fast (search) access to people, messages and attached files.
• Alongside emails, Xobni shows sender information, previous conversations, related people and exchanged files.
• Xobni shows conversations in threaded form.
• To easily schedule appointments, Xobni looks up your free time and puts in in an email template.
• Xobni identifies all a person's email addresses and finds phone numbers in messages, too.
• Integration with LinkedIn lets Xobni display pictures and company information sans your manually adding them.
• Aggregate statistics let you find out about your email habits.
• Xobni supports Windows XP/Vista and Outlook 2003/7.

Guide Review - Xobni 1.4 - Outlook Productivity Add-On

They're all in your emails: the friends you've made, the deals you struck, the files you've received, the poems you've sent, the parties you're dressing for. You just have to search for them. Or you have a smart agent find them for you when you need them.

Xobni does some of that magic. Open any email in Outlook with Xobni installed, and you'll see recent conversations with the sender, files you've exchanged with them and other people in your network (people who appear in Cc: lines, for example). Xobni's conversation view neatly aggregates threads in a concise form and lets you view emails in context.

Analyzing all your mail, Xobni indexes not only message content and attached files but also finds with whom you communicate, how often and about what. You can view detailed statistics and neat graphs about this and more (how many new people have you mailed over the last year, and how many mailed you?). Xobni's real value is in applying that knowledge.

Xobni is, fortunately, reasonably smart about identifying all a person's email addresses (manually merging or separating them takes changing the contact's name) and ranks your contacts according to the frequency with which you exchange mail. Maybe it could go a bit further and look at quality, too. That could also help Xobni identify important emails. Currently, it puts emails in context brilliantly, but cannot guide you to the next key mail — or remind you to follow up.

You don't have to open a contact's email to see Xobni in all its glory, of course: Xobni finds people, text in emails and attachments fast with all the useful context information at hand. For people, Xobni finds phone numbers in email and makes it easy to schedule together time (looking for free time in your calendar first). For people with a public LinkedIn profile, Xobni can conveniently display work information and photos.

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