Rarely do I see an Outlook addon that’s worth any attention and is also free. This is not so with the awesome Xobni (Inbox backwards by the way), which makes Outlook a bit more fun to use, but also lends a hand to organization and productivity.

The application is based on a complex (and very useful) analytics system which analyzes your email and creates summaries in a sidebar for you, but also whole reports in separate windows if you wish. Among it’s features is the ability to take a look at email activity times (when your contacts send you emails), people connected to any contact, files exchanged, flag complete times, email response times and so on. For an in-depth look at the inner workings of Xobni, venture on!

(I want to extend my special thanks to Geoff, who possibly has one of the best titled blogs on the net. He was kind enough to send me an invitation to Xobni, so I wouldn’t die of anticipation, thanks a lot Geoff!)

Initial impressions

First of all, I installed Xobni and ran it on two separate Outlook users. Sadly I had to uninstall it, and then reinstall it for the other user, it seems they need to iron this out a bit. My first impression of Xobni however was very positive. It seems to give you quite good feedback on what it’s doing. When you start Outlook it says “waiting for Outlook to settle down”. This is a nice touch, the wording is friendly and fun. When it found out that it was looking at an IMAP account it displayed that it has detected that this is an IMAP account, so sync may be a bit slower. I found that it gets to 50% quite quickly and it takes it a while from there. I had 240 messages on my account, with about 25 labels and it finished everything (analyzing and all), in about 4 minutes, not too long.

I then ran it on my other account, a POP account, with about 2500 messages in Outlook. With POP it gave me an exact time, of about 10:00 minutes, and it finished in exactly that time, now that’s what I call information. My problem is never that something takes long, it’s that an app says 5:00 minutes and it takes 2 minutes to get through each minute.

After it finished analyzing the stuff I had all my data nicely aggregated on the sidebar. Overall the initial process of installation was very impressive, very smooth and I could start using it immediately. I realized that to use it well though it’s best if you keep your stuff organized. If someone has more that one email then be sure to associate it with his/her account and so on.

The Xobni Sidebar

The greatest thing about the Xobni sidebar is that it also replaces the To-Do bar in Outlook.Not that I had a huge problem with it, but it’s nice that I now don’t have a 5-pane Outlook configuration. The sidebar contains a wealth of information, that really is actually helpful, and not just an analytics monster. Click on the pic to see a full size annotated diagram of the bar.

Rank

First of all, rank is a very good indicator of the importance of the specific contact. This is subject to how you use Outlook, but if you manage all your blogging related stuff, more often than not, someone you send emails to more, is likely to be a higher priority than others.

Time indicator bars

The time indicator bars are great for fun-statistic reasons, but they are also helpful in choosing the right time to send emails. Or rather, knowing the time you are most likely to get a response. It may also be a good idea to send people emails when they are the busiest, since if you send them stuff overnight, they will receive it with a wealth of other emails. If you drop them a line at their busiest, they will see the email come in, and dedicate at least 3 seconds to it, which is all you need.

In/Out bars

Again, a great visualization tool, showing you the number of emails sent to the contact (out), and the number of emails received from the contact (in). This is more for fun, but it may tell you if you are perhaps neglecting someone, or if you need to cut back on the payload you send to the person.

Connected people

This area is great for discovering sort of hidden networks. I guess it looks at CC and BCC information and extracts the connections from there. I don’t look at CC lists all the time, so I don’t necessarily know who’s who, but this shows me at least who’s connected to who. Clicking on the persons name will take you to his/her Xobni profile in the sidebar.

Conversations

This area of the sidebar is pretty standard, showing you email conversations between you and the contact. What’s pretty unique (and cool) is that clicking on a message doesn’t open up that email in Outlook. Instead, the sidebar changes to show you all emails in that conversation. There’s a detail slider found here, which enables you to show more, or less, of the messages in view. Very cool! If you click on a specific email it takes you to that email, shown inside the sidebar. From there you can access Outlook features like reply and forward, or you can just simply open the email.

Talking about this really doesn’t let the ease at which Xobni accomplished this show through. Using 3rd party applications to navigate the original app usually results in disaster, or less then favorable scenarios, but this is all amazingly fluid and easy to manage.

Exchanged files

This is another quite useful tool, I often find myself remembering that I shared something with a contact, but looking for it means at least one search, but usually two or more. Attached files are shown by date, so all you need to do is scroll down a bit if it is a recent file and you can open it directly. You can also open the email it was sent in and take a look.

Organization

If you click on “Organize” at the top of Xobni, you will be shown an overview of some important information. List of upcoming appointments, a list of your Outlook to-do’s, and a list of people that you haven’t really been in touch with lately. These are all great features, and it’s extra handy that they are on a separate page, since most of this info isn’t always needed.

Search

The search bar at the top of Xobni is pretty powerful. Just type in something, and you will receive results as you type, AJAX style. The results are absolutely spot on and well categorized. A search for Xobni revealed Xobni support for “people”, emails with “Xobni” in it for emails, and the Xobni home page for web results.

My friend is organizing a poker party soon, and so searching for “poker” shows me his emails, and the rules of poker on Wikipedia for web search results. I don’t think I will be chucking Google out the window just yet, but it’s pretty handy and does it’s job well.

Xobni analytics

The wealth of info in Xobni analytics is pretty awesome. Again, the fun-factor is definitely present, but I see great potential in extending your productivity skills here. I especially find the response time and flag completion time graphs very expressive, since they sort of show you your performance. Since you can zoom in to a day, or zoom out to a year, you can monitor your progress really well. Let me show you just how powerful the analytics is here.

Say I want to research my response times. Some who are well endowed with statistical knowledge will tell me that this isn’t the best number to look at, since you give some people priority, some answers you intentionally wait with, and so on. Well, you can get rid of most of these discrepancies.

You can filter results (and show them on the graph), by date, by recipient, by domain (that’s a new one), folders, specific subject (or a term contained within), recipient type (direct, CC, BCC), I really do have to say, the list goes on and on. The possibilities are endless, and while you may not be able to filter out some stuff, you can do a pretty descent job. I receive a lot of Google Calendar reminders, and I don’t want these to count toward my response time, since I don’t respond at all. I can easily filter these out now.

Oh, and you can change graph types, email graphs, copy them, save them or print them out. A lot of features, unobtrustive, but there if you need them. That’s how I like it.

Everyday Xobni use

While I can’t give you a detailed description here, I know that Xobni will become my daily companion. If for nothing else, then because it requires no maintenance, it sits there quietly, gathering my data. I have seen no slowing effect, both Outlook remained fast and Xobni is really fast.

Navigation feels a lot like the iPhone’s, as I’ve mentioned, because of the sliding effect when you navigate, adding a fluidity to the otherwise very well thought out interface. No matter how many conversations a contact had, no matter how many people in the network, I never saw a twitch in the slide, or other operations. Search takes less than a second, it lists all results by the time you finish typing, and it took about 2-3 seconds for the web search to load.

Features I’d like to see

I can’t really think of too many very useful features I am missing. That being said, I’m sure there are a lot in the works, so I’m eagerly waiting. One thing that could be shown is timezone information. If Xobni can determine the phone number from an email, using the country code it could show you time zone info. It could then also show you a map of your contacts. I agree, the map is not a 100% important feature in this.

My verdict

This is starting to sound like a paid review, but I assure you it isn’t. I would probably say the same thing if it was, so if someone at Xobni is reading, feel free to send any amount of money my way. But seriously, Xobni is the best piece of software I have seen in ages. It puts some fun back into email, while managing to be of some assistance in organization, and especially in productivity.

I would definitely recommend this to anybody, <Restricted to Xobni’s people> I would possibly even pay up to $20 to use it <End of Restriction>. I wouldn’t be surprised if this would be a much featured app in many places in the upcoming weeks. The interface is awesome, the information content is first class, and using it is super fun, yay! I can’t think of anything negative to say, sorry. I’m sure there is though, but I’m blinded by love at first site at the moment, I’ll be sure to tell you guys if I find anything.

If you want to get Xobni, your best bet is to head over to the Xobni home page and sign up for the closed beta. If you’re lucky you will be sent an invitation soon, but be patient, trust me, it’s worth it!