Xobni

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Xobni logoEven though Inbox Zero has helped me gain some control over my e-mail, I still need all the help I can get. Last week, Simon Coles sent me an invitation for Xobni – a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that offers fast search, conversation threading, a social networking platform, and many other features designed to make email better – or as Xobni (inbox spelt backwards) like to put it:

“Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox.”

It’s already becoming very useful – earlier today I couldn’t find a document that I was sure I’d been sent (and the Outlook 2007 search functionality didn’t seem to find it either). I used Xobni to highlight another e-mail from the same correspondent and there was the missing document – one of the listed files that we had exchanged – from where I could open the original e-mail, or the attachment that I was after. Xobni will pull contact information out of e-mail messages (even if I don’t have an address book entry for a particular contact) and tells me who my contacts correspond with that I do too. There’s also an analytics feature that lets me track the volume of e-mail I receive (and how long it takes me to process), ranking my correspondents and telling me what time of day they tend to send me e-mail. It can also read my calendar and automatically highlight the times that I am available over the next few days, placing the details in an message, all ready to send. There’s VOIP integration too – although clicking on the Skype logo launched Office Communicator on my system (I don’t have Skype installed but I do have OCS). Finally, Xobni has its own built in search capabilities, which I’ve used a few times this evening to track down long lost e-mails based on the snippets of information that I could recall from the recesses of my mind. In fact, the only niggle I found was in my work e-mail, where it struggles to differentiate between first and last names (our display names are formatted with the lastname in front – e.g. “Wilson Mark” – and, even though the e-mail address is something like mark.wilson@country.companyname.com, Xobni thinks my name is “Wilson” but has no such problem for contacts with sensible display names – like “Mark Wilson” – or with punctuation in the display name – such as “Wilson, Mark”).

Xobni’s invitation-only period is over (although they are still banding around the beta tag in true web 2.0 style) and the product is available for all to download. I’ve only been using it for a few days but I’m very impressed with the information that it gives me – even so, I’ll leave the product review to those who know it best – check out the video below:

What I can say is that I reckon Xobni is pretty cool. It seems I’m not alone as Bill Gates demoed the product in his keynote at the 2008 Office Developers Conference and Xobni was selected for Microsoft’s Startup Accelerator Program but the founders are reported to have walked away from an outright takeover. If you use Microsoft Outlook for your mail, then Xobni is worth checking out and could save you a lot of time.

Microsoft 2.0

Posted on By Mark Wilson

As someone who works closely with Microsoft, I’m very interested to see what happens to the company as Bill Gates steps aside. Changes are already afoot – anyone who has attended a recent marketing event (like the 2008 launch wave) will have heard about the idea of software plus services – and some of Microsoft’s partners need to start thinking about their own business models as hosted services become more and more attractive to corporates.

Two years ago, I wrote that I didn’t think the “webtop” would replace the desktop. I still think that is true – enterprises are not yet ready to store their data in “the cloud” – but things are starting to change and there seems little doubt that web services are the direction that were all heading in. Windows and Office will be here for a while yet but Microsoft desparately needs to get a piece of the action if it is to stay relevant – hence their failed attempt to buy Yahoo!. Meanwhile, rather than follow the Google model of storing everything in cyberspace, Microsoft Live Mesh looks at how to make data accessible by connecting people, processes and technology – wherever they are.

Last week’s Windows Weekly podcast (episode 57) featured an interview with Mary Jo Foley, author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-gates Era. I’ve not read the book yet (it’s on my Amazon wishlist) but it may be interesting to track the accompanying blog – Microsoft 2.0.

Personally, I’m glad that Microsoft didn’t launch a hostile bid for Yahoo! and instead withdrew their offer. It seems pretty clear that the Yahoo! Inc. management team would rather have hit the self-destruct button than become part of Microsoft Corporation and, to me, that implies a degree of immaturity. Meanwhile, Microsoft can keep their cash and move forward with their software plus services model. When one of the world’s largest companies has to borrow money for a takeover, that’s not a good sign – and that’s an awful lot of money that they could do something useful with.