One of our users brought our attention to this outlook plug-in called xobni, that’s Inbox spelled backward. before giving a feed back to the user about the toy, I decided to install it on my outlook, and play around a little bit with it. so here is what I think about the plug-in.

Xobni inbox

Searching e-mails in outlook is slow; this depend on how much e-mails you have on your inbox or other folders, but for the most part people keep a track load of mail on the inbox or archive folders, this is not good if you have to search emails regularly in outlook. so, does xobni solve this problem and bring nirvana to your outlook search experience? not for me. I won’t be quick to judge that the plug-in sucks, because I’m running windows vista on my work computer, and as many of you know windows vista by nature is slow and plug-ins like these make it even slower. opening outlook on my computer was slow as hell, but once I manage to open outlook, it runs fine, well, I would say acceptable fine, because outlook uses more memory with the plug-in so, if you don’t have enough memory, this plug-in could be a taste of hell for you.

I haven’t ran the plug-in on outlook using Windows XP, but I’m sure the performance with this plug-in could be much better on that platform.

to have an understanding of what xobni does watch this video from the developer guys that came out with the idea:

now let’s look one of our pals explaining the social side of xobni:              

 

there you have it, hopefully those videos and my small review gave you a fair understanding what xobni is and what it does. if you want to download it you can do so here.

ah! but wait, here is critical tip, make sure you are running outlook in Cache Mode before you install and run this plug-in, it uses the cache mode feature in outlook to index and search e-mails, otherwise it will be unbearable slow.  if you don’t know what cache mode is and how to turn it on, follow these steps I copied from xobni web site:

Cached Exchange Mode is a setting within Microsoft Outlook which affects the manner by which data is collected from a network. Running in cached mode prevents Outlook from constantly ‘calling’ the server for new information.

Xobni does not create its own storage of email data, but indexes the data already in Outlook. If Outlook is constantly calling the server for data this will incite Xobni to constantly index, thus creating a greater draw on the network and CPU. For this reason we highly recommend running in cached mode.

To do so, follow these steps:

  • Within Outlook go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Account Settings’. In the resulting dialog box select the tab that says ‘Email’. You will see your exchange account in the list. Either double click the account name you wish to change or highlight it and click the ‘change’ button.
  • The next dialog box will reveal a an option to check or un-check the ‘Use Cached Exchange Mode’ option. Make sure it is checked. Close the window.
  • You will need to restart ‘Outlook’ for the change to take place.

there you have it, I hope you reach outlook Nirvana with it.