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Outlook & Xobni, a Good Match
by Vinny La Bash, Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., Florida 
www.spcug.org
vlabash (at) comcast.net

This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards, but there is nothing backward about this free plug-in module from www.xobni.com. The more email you receive, the more you will like and appreciate Xobni. The program works as a data mining machine for your stored emails. Without Xobni, the best you can do with Outlook is to organize your email by folders, messages, and dates. With Xobni, you can organize your email by people, email histories, and personal, social or business relationships. 

You need Outlook 2003 or 2007 to use Xobni. Either XP or Vista will work fine with the program. The folks at Xobni are also working on versions for other email programs such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail. How long this will take is unknown. Downloading and installation is quick, easy, and seamless. The program requires some time to synchronize itself with outlook. The amount of time will be determined by the size of the email data base you have accumulated. I had slightly over two thousand emails in eighteen different folders, and that took about ten minutes. 

If you keep a lot of information on your contacts, it’s difficult to extract that information in a way that can be useful with Outlook. All that changes once Xobni is installed. Changes begin with an attractive panel that sits on the right side of your Outlook screen and doesn’t infringe or interfere with any of Outlook’s standard functions. The panel interface slides open when you need it, and discretely closes when you don’t. 

You get two options within this panel. The first brings up a blank email which is nice. For you organizational types, the second option lets you send meeting requests. A real time saver is the simultaneous display of open time slots that Xobni drags from your Outlook calendar. 

Your contact profiles display at the top of the Xobni panel with pictures if one is in the profile. That’s followed by the phone number and a thread of any conversations you’ve had along with files you’ve exchanged. Specifics topics are quickly found with Xobni’s search tool, and there is a handy slider that exposes or hides lines of email text. While it appears you could be getting bogged down in details, the material is organized so that navigating through the information is an easy, pleasant journey filled with discovery. 

Skype’s VoIP service integrates with PC, Xobni quite well. A mouse click on a phone number within a Xobni profile generates a SkypeOut call. 

You can use Xobni for simple searches within Outlook, and Xobni searching is lightning fast in comparison. That’s probably because it’s integrated within Outlook rather than running on top of it like most third party applications. Xobni gives you more than express searching. It organizes social information logically with additional functions that Outlook simply can’t match. How often have you given up searching with Outlook because the program lacks even the simplest logic for intelligent searching? 

Instead of treating mail conversations, contacts and calendars as separate entities, Xobni weaves them together in a responsive, intuitive interface. It’s hard to go wrong with this tool. Go to www.Xobni.com and get started.