16 April 2008 Wednesday

Xobni : MS Outlook inbox control, search, happiness

Playing with Xobni for the first time.

A little mesmerized… Can’t give a real review yet, but I will say it is very fast, fluid, and pretty!

I was just searching for an effective Search tool for Outlook (at office), but this is a full plugin that sits in Outlook itself… I’m not always thrilled by extra sidebar stuff, but this one makes itself discrete when you want it to, and anyway is so pretty and fluid that I really don’t mind!

I’ll check out the robustness of its search soon, but meanwhile color(pun!) me pleased. :)

Much appreciation to John for the invite. I did get a direct invite from Xobni shortly thereafter, but still — thank you for the Xobni invite, John!

*update: okay, a couple of issues:

• I should be able to keep several “tabs” open to jump back and forth between. Instead, the tabs seem to operate on breadcrumb hierarchy, in which you can go back/up, but then can’t go forward/down anymore because going back/up removes everything in front/below.
• I should probably be able to pop-out search results, and/or have multiple and customizable columns to better organize my search results. That being said, search is fast. Happily so.

• Performs exact text search beautifully, but does not seem to allow for operators “AND”, “OR”, nor any controls for searching only emails from a particular person, or searching only subject, or particular date range, etc. I guess the application is geared more as an email management, rather than full search tool.