Social Media Invades Outlook
Xobni is an amazing little Outlook plug-in that really adds value. Once installed it quickly indexes your emails and contacts to provide some great capabilities.
- Lighting Fast Email Search
- Email Analytics
- Relationship statistics
- Personal Assistant
- Threaded conversations
- Shared attachments
- Phone number extraction
- Web services integration with external sources (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Hoovers)
When installed Xobni adds another panel to your Outlook client. The panel is populated with data related to the sender of any email you select in Outlook.
(** N.B. Email addresses have been removed from the images resulting in white or black boxes **)
Working from the top down let’s walk through what you get.
The profile contains basic details and contact information if available. The ‘edit profile’ link allows you to select what data source to use for profile information. You can choose Xobni, Outlook, LinkedIn or Facebook. The four tabs in the profile area are described below.
Statistics shows the email activity between you and the sender. Since I select myself the graph is showing all my email activity.
Actions provides quick links to some basic tasks. The ‘Schedule time with xxx’ is especially useful creating an email with a quick view of your availability over the next few days. No more hunting through your calendar for open time slots.
The LinkedIn tab attempts to find the individual in the LinkedIn network. You can then view their LinkedIn profile right from Outlook. If they are not one of your LinkedIn connections an additional ‘Add +’ button displays.
As with the LinkedIn tab the Facebook tab provides the ability to find and add individuals to your Facebook Friends.
As expected the Hoover’s tab provides information on the organization. Here I selected an email from Mindjet.
As part of the indexing process Xobni looks to identify relationships based on your email traffic. In the ‘Network’ pane it ranks relationships between you and the selected sender. Using the magnifying glass you can search just this network for a specific contact.
All conversations (threaded) that have occurred with this specific individual are shown in a scrollable and searchable list.
Any files exchanged by email are shown in a scrollable and searchable list.
Data junkies can even review their own email activity. This data can be sent, copied, saved or printed.
Since installing Xobni finding and adding contact to LinkedIn and Facebook has become less of a chore.
