Simple Chronicle!

There has been a lot of press around Xobni lately. Web Worker Daily published an article on their experince with Xobni for a week. I recently installed Xobni (on my outlook at work) as well and my exeprience did not meet my expectations. 

Pros:

• Xobni search is much faster and more useful than native outlook search.
• Scheduling a meeting using Xobni is very useful as it provides a couple of different options for meeting times.

Cons:

• It slowed down Outlook tremendously.
• It took up valuable real estate space (Note: I have the Outlook to-do bar turned on).

In the end I turned off Xobni mainly due to the cons. My thoughts on what I want:

1. While there are a few useful features in Xobni, majority of the features – such as showing me all the people a contact has emailed, analytics around the times when I receive/send email are not the ones I would use regularly, especially in a corporate environment.
2. In a coprorate environment, what I would really want from Xobni is a better way to manage my tasks in Outlook. Native task management in outlook is really bad. I think this will let many more coporate users embrace Xobni.
3. Give me an easy way to disable Xobni right from the tool, when I don’t need it. (like times when I am on wireless network, in an airport)
4. Give me a way to turn off the feature of showing someone else’s network. Using this feature, I could see all the people my GM emailed – not sure he wants me to see that. This will be a big problem in corporate environments.
5. Give me a better way to read email, not just analyze the data. Maybe take some cue from Josh Kopelman post on feed frenzy. Give us a way to spend little time and get through the needed email every day – that’s what I want.

I have also talked to some other people at my work who have deployed Xobni, their experiences have been similar (sample size of three).