Time for another Outlook plug to fly out the beta-zone and into the great wide open. I’ve been on Xobni for a few months now, and I must say I really enjoy the plug. There’s a load of options this thing has, but I’ll tell you what I use it for. The rest is something you can dig out for yourself. So, the coolest part is that when I click on an email in my inbox, Xobni keeps track of all conversations I had with the sender. It also lists all the attachments that have been sent by me or to me from the selected contact, so I no longer need to search my inbox or any folders I might have dumped the email in. Other than that, it keeps track of the contact’s activity - which is the timeline of the conversations. That means that I can see when it is most likely that this contact is behind his or her computer. With a very easy ’schedule time with x’ I can book a meeting, or I can see the contact data in a glance. Sure, all of this information is already in Outlook, but Xobni just makes it accessible even faster. Less time spent looking. Yeey!

So, below is a real sized image of the little sidebar that is added in Outlook. I’ve clicked on my own name from an email I sent to someone, so this lists my activity. I peak during lunch, funny enough, and apparently there’s no time during the day that I have no email activity. Maybe I should send this to my boss :)

One of the other nice little thingies about Xobni is the fact that it also keeps track of ‘lost contacts’. It’s like ‘hey, did you know it’s been three months since you’ve had any conversations with x or y?’ - I love that.

Get Xobni for your Office Outlook edition and join the fun!

After the jump: a video of Bill Gates promoting Xobni and the Xobni demo video.