I bet you have heard of Xobni if you read tech websites such as Lifehacker or Cnet recently. In fact, I come to know Xobni from there as well. Xobni is Outlook plugin that completes your Outlook of course. In terms of compatibility, it works on XP and Vista for both Outlook 2003 and 2007.

The good thing about Xobni is, once installed, Xobni will appear in your Outlook left pane (compared to other desktop search functions such as Google desktop, which can search emails as well). However, you have an option to show or hide it. When you first install it, it will index your email. This is one time index, which indexes all emails available in your personal folder and inbox. Depending on how big or how many emails you have, it will take some time to complete.

Xobni is built with your contact profile in mind. This is where its strength lies. Each emails, contacts, meeting activities are tracked and gathered to build impressive statistic. It answers why Xobni is statistic-rich. Who is your most responsive email recipient? How many emails have you exchanged between you and any particular contact? What and how many documents have you exchanged between you and your contacts? Xobni can tell you this.

My most admired function in Xobni would be their search function. In my observation, it is much more faster than default outlook search. It will populate the result as you type in the search box. It searches people and email contents at the same time. In the search result, it shows to and from whom the email is, and the snapshot of the email content when you move your mouse over the email.

With all these cool search features, the search function is lacking a few important things. There is no filter to search by adding more parameters such date, size or location. The search pulls all emails.

Another thing is, If you keep your email on different folders, the search results can be opened, replied and forwarded, but it won’t tell you where this email was kept.

Apart from the search function, Xobni allows you to view the email in thread. Unlike outlook’s view by conversation function, you can control how long you want to view each emails in any thread, by utilizing the sliding bar.

1 thing that I never tested is the Xobni integration with Skype as mentioned by PCWorld. If you have Skype’s VoIP service on your PC, you can make a SkypeOut call with a quick tap of a phone number within a Xobni profile.

While I was satisfied with Xobni features so far, I’m experiencing slow performance intermittently, when I start my outlook and download emails (usually hundreds at 1 time). Perhaps it still depends on how your system performance as well.

Try Xobni and you’ll love it.