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Possibly the Best 3rd Party Office App on the Planet - Xobni Review

by Jason Bean on April 7th, 2008

It’s been a few weeks now since I got the invite to download, install and begin using Xobni. I’ve got to tell you folks, this very well may be one of the most ingenious applications ever added into a member of the Microsoft Office family.

In a quick summary; Xobni incorporates itself into Outlook as an additional pane of information. It collects and efficiently presents information related to the selected sender or recipient of the e-mail that is chosen.

Let’s take a quick review of the different sections of information available in the main info pane of the Xobni panel.

First, you can see a search box. Pretty self-explanatory. Quickly find text in your e-mail program. Performing a search will quickly find any contact or e-mail containing the text included.

The top orange bar provides the contact’s name (which I’ve got blurred out for privacy). The next area shows you the time period and quantity of emails received from this contact. This allows you to quickly determine when you’re most likely to catch them at their computer and potentially get a quicker reply to your e-mail. If there is a contact photo it is displayed here as well. The last part in this section is a total count of received and sent e-mails to this contact.

The next area allows me to quickly contact this person via Skype, schedule a meeting or send a brand new e-mail.

Next we have a small network identified for this contact. This includes anyone that has been included as a recipient in an e-mail to or from the contact. Very simple idea, but also a powerful benefit to quickly determine other related contacts that could be a resource for information related to a previous e-mail. If I hover over the person’s name I can see their e-mail and phone number if they exist in my address book already (identified by the orange person icon), or just their e-mail address if they aren’t currently in my address book.

The next section is a brief recap of recent conversations I’ve had with the contact. This allows me to quickly scan a history of e-mails related to the person. I can hover over the message and read the body of the message in the tool tip, or I can click on an e-mail and the Xobni pane will show me a small preview of the e-mail header, subject, body, signature, everything including quick access to reply, reply all, forward, etc.

As you can see in the example, if there are multiple messages in the conversation thread, when I click on the message I can get a brief summary of each message include in the conversation history. Again, extremely handy and intuitive collection of information.

The last section displayed is a list of attachments that have been included in previous e-mails with the selected contact. How many times have you been reading a response to a message and it references an earlier attachment with some kind of data in it you needed. Now you no longer have to exit out of the message you’re reading to go find the attachment with the information you need out of the attachment. If you hover over the attachment information you can see the text of the e-mail message that included the attachment. To open the document in it’s default viewer all you need to do is click on it.

Another feature I haven’t even talked about is the Xobni Analytics that’s available. Loads of graphs and charts providing information like:

• Daily summaries
• Mail traffic
• response times
• unique contacts
• folders used
• subjects
• recipient types
• flag status
• context of e-mails
• and lots more

Here’s a video from Xobni that does a great job of really highlighting everything quickly

You can find out more specific details and screen shots by going here on the Xobni website.

If you’d like to give Xobni a try for yourself, go to my original post and Jeff Bonforte, the CEO of Xobni, has offered invites to anyone that’s interested. I’m sure you won’t be sorry and you’ll be amazed that you’ve been as productive as you have been with Outlook without Xobni already installed.

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POSTED IN: 3rd Party Apps, Business Users, Office, Outlook, Software, User Experience