Xobni is In!

If you feel buried in email or feel that your life is ruled by Outlook, check out a new service called Xobni, a free download utility for Outlook. Xobni, which is "In Box" spelled backward, is a cool new app to help you organize email, contacts, and appointments across Outlook.

Xobni installs a toolbar in Outlook that basically connects lots of obvious data and puts it at your fingertips. With each new email, you see the sender's full communication history in the toolbar. Power users can add pictures to the Xobni contacts for more face to face appeal. Xobni also extracts phone numbers from email and remembers them with your contacts. Outlook users with telephony integration can likely tweak their service to respond to those phone number fields for one click dialing. I recommend playing with that feature and reporting back to us.

Xobni speeds email searches by effectively indexing your inbox and contact lists. You can see threaded conversations in the Xobni tool bar to make tracking updates effortless. The toolbar includes cool charts to track statistics on who you email, who responds, how fast they respond, ranks of power users, etc.

One of the coolest features Xobni offers is a glimpse at email's social network. By examining and tracking BCC and CC members, Xobni shows you the email networks within your user circles. Sales people love this feature because it gives a quick glimpse at the potential network of their vendors and customers by listing at a glance who people connect with via email.

Outlook makes appointment scheduling very tedious, so Xobni put time in their scheduler. With Xobni, you can schedule appointments at the click of the mouse. The system automatically finds open slots in your schedule and coordinates tracking with ease.

I run several operations projects at any given moment, and Xobni makes it easy for me to schedule appointments, track threads, check contacts, and see who's responding to my project requests in a timely fashion. I recommend downloading Xobni and checking it out. I'm a convert.