The best Outlook add-in --- ever

I'm a long-time Outlook user, and I've tried more add-ins than I care to count. I just started using a free one called Xobni, and I'm here to report it's the best add-in I've ever tried. This is one of the few that actually delivers, and does it in a big way.

Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is designed to help you find emails and attachments fast, and also creates a kind of social network right inside of Outlook. As you can see in the figure below, Xobni appears as a sidebar on Outlook's right-hand side. When you read an email, the sidebar display information about the person with whom you're communicating, including a list of all "conversations" you've had with them, a list of all files you've exchanged, the person's phone number, and that person's "social network," essentially a list of people with whom the person has exchanged emails.

That means for every email you get, you can see a quick history of all of your previous email exchanges, a tremendous time-saver for when you want to review your communications with someone. Xobni will also let you review all of the emails in the sidebar itself by clicking on any, and it shows them as threaded conversations, so you can trace their history.

There are also convenient icons for sending an email to the person and scheduling a meeting via Outlook. And at the top of the screen is great information for data addicts, although it's unclear how useful it actually is. You'll be shown the total number of emails you've exchanged, the rank of the person among those with whom you've exchanged emails, and a graph displaying the hours of the day, and how many emails you receive from that person during each of the hours.

In fact, statistics lovers can quickly get lost in this program; there's a Xobni Analytics feature that provides a mind-boggling amount of information about your email use, such as the average amount of time it takes you to respond to people by day, month, and week. And that's just the beginning. You can, for example, even see the median time it takes you to respond to individuals, to individuals in a domain...well, you get the picture. Check out the figure below to see what I mean.

In short, if you're looking to get more out of your email, this is the one to get.

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