While looking for some outstanding piece of code to tell you about, I had a a little big revelation – I always hated Outlook, but I never took the time to search for the right plugins for it. After all, most programs that support plugins aren’t such a big deal without them. For example, think about Firefox, Adobe Photoshop, or WordPress – all of them can get the job done right out of the box, but plugins are those that bring them only a few steps away from being flawless, so I started to look for a serious plugin to make Outlook at least “good,” if not “perfect,” aaaand…
… I was really surprised when I found myself facing Xobni, especially since I heard some of my friends cursing the day of birth when having to extract data from Outlook, and now Outlook mail search and data extraction, as well as other similar tasks, seem to be nothing more than a child’s play!
While providing much better email search than Outlook itself, from any point of view you can think of, Xobni also allows you to automatically organize all the info about your contacts, extracting phone numbers, scheduling appointments with a single click, and this is only the beginning…
Email and contacts search is great, but what about attachments version tracking, advanced search for this particular case, and even much easier attachment handling? All checked!
Threaded conversations can be good… or not, but I think it’s better to have all emails exchanged with somebody in the same place, instead of having to wonder through your inbox, looking for them. Xobni allows you to display all emails exchanged with a certain contact as a list, and you can even create lists for all the messages interchanged between more than just two people.
Since everything goes social these days, Xobni also offers instant access to Facebook profiles, LinkedIn, Hoover information, and it even goes as far as offering Skype integration. As far as I was able to see, Twitter is not included on the list just yet, but I’m sure they’ll add it in some future version…
At last, you should also be aware that Xobni offers advanced statistics, and if all the above is not enough, then you should also know that Xobni Mobile will soon be available, the Blackberry version being expected to arrive later this summer.
Do I really have to say more? Oh, yeah, the price: $0! Yupp, you got it right – Xobni is a free and extremely useful Outlook plugin, and if I really had to say something about its bad parts, there’s only one thing to be mentioned here – it only works with Outlook 2003/2007, requiring at least a 2 GHz processor, and 1 GB of memory.
