Projects Possible

I posted about my initial Xobni impressions a number of weeks ago.  Recall that Xobni (zob-nee), inboX spelled backward, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides you with nearly instantaneous access to “the most important information in your email”. This message is a follow-up to that message and provides more insight on my continued use.

I think it is important as I continue this post that I point out that Xobni is still beta software.  As such a problem or two is to be expected… after all you aren’t a “beta tester” for nothing.  You are helping to identify the “bugs” to make a better product when it is finally released.

Overall, great experience with the tool!  The capability offered in the Search engine is absolutely amazing to me.  I am used to the Outlook 2003 searches where you put something into the search dialog tell it to find it and then come back after lunch and hope that it is finished finding what you are looking for.   With Xobni the second you start typing in the search bar results are being found,  and not just results in email, but results in your contacts and even on the web.  I am amazed at how quickly this search operates and it is every bit as good as the search that I have in NEO and I don’t have to load a new program in order to take advantage of it.  

I have been playing around with multi-level searching and so far my results have not been as promising.   An example of this might be that I know I received a message from John Doe.   I search for John… and then from the contact results I click on John Doe.  Xobni is now showing my all of my email conversations with John Doe and the files we exchanged as well as John Doe’s phone number.   What I would like to do is to then use the search box again but ONLY display results from my John Doe match.   I do not see this as an advertised feature anywhere but the way Xobni builds the windows it is just something I would have expected it to be doing.

Xobni has two features directly below the phone number.   One of them is to Email the person the other is to schedule time with the person.  On my version of Outlook both of these do the same thing.  I get a new email window popping up inside of Outlook and the contact information for the person is displayed.   The only difference between the two is the subject line.  I would think that since we are integrated to Outlook that if you wanted to schedule time with someone that it would open up an Appointment window rather than an email window.  I’ve left support an email related to this behavior.

When I first started using Xobni I kept forgetting about the Organize Tab.  Rather than having to shift over to the Task page in Outlook or the Calendar Page in Outlook you can just click on the Organize tab and on one screen you can see both of those pieces of information.  What I don’t particularly care for on this display is that you see all tasks and they are alphabetically sorted.   Most people I know do not manage tasks alphabetically.  I’m a due date kinda guy.  I haven’t been able to figure out how to get them into due date order and I have a few hundred of them.  Great however if you are looking for tasks for a specific person or customer because searching works here too.

I’ve run across a few other small annoyances but none of them are severe enough to make me want to uninstall the application.  I did that over the weekend and found that I missed the phone number, conversation and searching capability so much I had to re-install it.   I’m thinking they truly have a winner here and will probably have to pry it from my dead fingers now that I have grown accustom to using it.   You can check them out at their website…

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