Xobni Beta – Week 1

I’ve had Xobni installed on my work machine for a little more than a week now, and I’m ready to post my results.

The installation of the tool was pretty quick, and didn’t require a lot of input from me, even though I opted for customization wherever possible. After it was installed, it ran a basic indexing job that took about 45 minutes. Considering I’ve got over 7000 items in my inbox and subfolders, that’s not bad.

Within about a day of installing, I found that it was giving me some pretty good results with regards to culling contact data from e-mails, as well as monitoring trends of who e-mails me when. The really interesting part came when I saw the “People Connected to” feature, as it was interesting to see who they correspond with (based on the e-mails I have, mind you). Also, the “Files exchanged with” feature is nice, as it allows me to dig up old attachments. The ranking system is a neat function, though I really didn’t find much practical use for it. On the other hand, the search feature blows the Outlook search function out of the water. The analytics feature is neat, though to be honest it doesn’t really provide much practical benefit to me.

So, after a week, I’ve got a wish list of features that I would like to see:

A way to see the entire ranking list, as well as weekly or monthly indicators as to whether certain people have moved up or down, and by how much

More contact management in the information for a person – maybe cull data from the Outlook address book

Multiple phone numbers for a person

I’ll be updating again in Week 3 of my beta testing.