Xobni Helping Hand for LinkedIn & Outlook

Haven’t heard of Xobni?  Its a plug-in that can really save you time!  I stumbled across it while using LinkedIn.  You can find people and email quickly with this tool, and it can improve your productivity.  What Xobni does is index the email in Outlook so you can find it about 50X faster.  With the option to connect to profiles in LinkedIn & Facebook, you will see the employer, job title & photo when sending or receiving email.  You’ll also have immediate access to their profile.  Your conversations will be threaded based upon the subject line to make it easier to spot who said what & when.  Xobni will find attachments by person too.

It works as a sidebar in Outlook and acts as an automatic address book.  Look for a person and it will also display their phone number.  The sidebar displays recent emails and will find attachments by person too.  When you are looking at attachments it will place the most recent at the top of the list so if you have exchanged a few versions, you can can grab the current version quickly.  There’s even a search in the attachments if you need to look through the results list.

A few other great features include Hoovers & Skype connectivity. But my favorite things are the statistics and email analytics.  From here you can tell what day you are slowest to respond to email and who you email most often. You can view what times your contacts send you emails most often, so you know when they are on-line and likely to pick up the phone.

The biggest drawback is it can create volumes of traffic on your Microsoft Exchange server.  In order to install it you’ll need admin privledges and if running off a Exchange server, you’ll want to use what’s called cached exchange mode.  If your administrator says no, don’t feel you’re locked out… you can still use it on your personal computer at home.