Xobni Plus Review

Xobni Plus also indexes appointments, indexing e-mails from users’ Outlook calendars. The idea is to do searches on top of searches to find that proverbial e-mail needle in the inbox haystack.

In addition, Xobni Plus includes filters for the conversations bar, letting users pare down their e-mail search to only users they’ve had direct conversations with or to search the full message bodies. This is handy for corporate workers and journalists like me who need to weed out those pitch lists that have hundreds of recipients. I clicked on an e-mail from Scott in my inbox, and Xobni Plus let me search keywords from within those conversations with Scott. Essentially, Xobni Plus compartmentalised my inbox, letting me shut out the less useful messages that can clutter search sessions.

Autosuggest

The last Xobni Plus feature I delved into was autosuggest. To see this in action, I left the Xobni toolbar to create a new e-mail message in Outlook. As soon as I started typing in the first letter of a contact—say, the letter “N” for Nick—Xobni Plus presented me with a slew of e-mail contacts to click on, using the Xobni Rank system to provide contact options based on the frequency with which e-mails had been exchanged.

The autosuggest feature in Xobni Plus gives users options for every contact that has ever appeared in any e-mail in the entire inbox and makes them accessible in the compose window, underneath the original contacts suggested by Outlook. This is a marked departure from Outlook’s autocomplete feature, which only brings up contacts a user directly e-mails.

Social Features in Xobni Hold the Coolness Factor

Advanced search and autosuggest are incredibly useful, but the social features in Xobni hold the coolness factor. I’d seen Xobni demos of its Facebook and LinkedIn integration before, but it wasn’t until I used these capabilities in Xobni Plus that I understood the gravity of the connection-making. I opted to let Xobni Plus communicate with Facebook and LinkedIn by clicking on those companies’ icons in the Xobni toolbar, right below contact profiles.

Xobni asked me to enter my Facebook and LinkedIn passwords, and then warned me that I was authorising Xobni to communicate with those apps. I clicked “yes.” The next time I selected an e-mail in Outlook from my colleague Scott, I saw his Facebook profile picture, with his latest public posts. To find him, Xobni recognised that Scott’s work e-mail was associated with his Facebook account.

Clicking on the profile launched the full Facebook profile, making Xobni Plus quite the social app launch pad. It’s a nice perk, but if I’m Xobni, I would think I’d want to keep users in Outlook, not let them migrate to other social networking apps. I guess Xobni believes people will do it anyway, so why not go with the flow and make it easier?

One quibble I have with Xobni Plus, which is probably a reflection on the tool itself, not the paid service upgrade, is that the plug-in sometimes stalls my inbox. So, if I have Xobni Plus open for a while, when I go to click on e-mails, and especially switching back and forth between e-mails, Outlook gets stuck with a 1- to 3-second latency snag. That didn’t happen before I installed Xobni Plus, so it can’t be a coincidence.

I’m not sure what Xobni can do to remedy this, but for me it’s a small price to pay for the ability to sift through thousands, or even just hundreds, of e-mails. Now that I’ve been using it for a week, I’ve developed a Google-esque comfort with Xobni, and I don’t intend to stop using it.

Conclusion

While $29.95 (£18) might seem like a lot of money to pay to use a tool that you’ve used for free, you only pay it once, and the search is much better than I remember from demos before Xobni Plus. Moreover, just as the paid version of Google Apps contains no advertising, Xobni Plus is ad-free the minute you start using it.

In all honesty, if you’re happy with the current search capabilities in your Outlook client (search in Outlook 2007 did get a lot more granular, adding filters for searching folders and finding mail from certain people and attachments), you won’t need Xobni Plus. You could even stick to the basic Xobni service if you like.

On the other hand you could wait until something more attuned to your needs came along from Xobni that you think is worth paying for. Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina told me Xobni will offer several premium models in the future, possibly including mobile versions.