According to the Xobni web site , Xobni is “the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox.” I’ve been using Xobni for the past few days, and it’s much more than that. With apologies to Jose Canseco, it’s Outlook on steroids

Installing Xobni is a breeze. The first time you run Xobni, it will index the e-mails that are currently in Outlook. For me, this process took around 15 minutes. Once your e-mails are indexed, you don’t really notice the indexing of new e-mails that goes on in the background.

Once Xobni has indexed your e-mails, the main Xobni sidebar shows several things about the person that sent you the current e-mail selected in Outlook. The top panel contains the Person Profile. Xobni shows a histogram of e-mails received from that person across different times of the day. While the display is well done, the information itself wasn’t all that helpful to me. Most of the histograms followed a normal, bell-shaped distribution curve. In that same section, Xobni shows the number of incoming and outgoing e-mails to that user, as well as how popular that contact is (in terms of e-mails sent and received) vis-a-vis other contacts in Outlook. The last bit of information that Xobni shows about the contact is her phone number, which is pulled from Outlook contacts or e-mail from that contact. In most cases, the phone number is correct. In some cases, Xobni selects the wrong information. The nice thing is that it shows you the source of the phone number, whether it’s an Outlook contact item or an e-mail. You can change the information if it’s incorrect.

The next panel is the Network. In this section, people that are included in e-mail conversations between you and contact show in the Person Profile are listed. People listed in the top of the Network are those that are included most often in e-mail conversation between you and the contact. A nice touch is the color coding of people in the Network. An orange icon represents people you’ve contacted directly, while a gray icon represents people you’ve never e-mailed directly. In addition, distribution lists have a different icon.

The third panel lists Conversations. E-mails are displayed in a threaded style, very similar to Google’s Gmail. Xobni groups individual e-mails into conversations based on the subject of the e-mail and the people in the To and CC fields. Conversations are listed in descending chronological order, with the most recent conversations listed at the top.

The last panel, and the one I find most useful, is the Files Exchanged. How many times have you wanted to find the document that you sent someone six weeks ago? Xobni pulls out all attachments that you’ve sent to, or received from, the contact and lists them in descending chronological order in the Files Exchanged panel.

That’s a quick overview of the Xobni Sidebar. Xobni also provides analytics for your Outlook e-mails also. The analytics shows things like mail traffic by hour, response times (most helpful), and unique contacts. It’s nice eye-candy that can show some interesting trends and patterns visually.

The most impressive feature of Xobni is its search capability. It’s lightning fast and well-integrated in the Xobni sidebar. Xobni will search on e-mail addresses, names, e-mail content and attachment names. Unfortunately, it doesn’t search on contents of files (yet).

All in all, Xobni is a fabulous productivity tool that every heavy-duty Outlook user should own. Yes, there are a few things that Xobni doesn’t do yet, but the public beta shows tremendous promise and is worth the (small) investment of time and energy required to install and learn the product.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the company that I work for, American Technology Services, Inc., is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and I am one of the 1.8 million people worldwide who has achieved Microsoft Certified Professional status.  I have been using Microsoft products and application development tools for a long, long time.  I am a big fan of Microsoft and their products.  So, if you expect me to poke fun at Microsoft…  you would be correct

Earlier today, I was asked to take a look at the Excel Web Services functionality in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Excel 2007.  At the time, it seemed like a fairly straightforward request.  We had a development server with MOSS 2007 and a development workstation with Office 2007.  I’m all set, right?  Well, not really.  I discover that the Excel that comes in certain Office suites doesn’t have a particular feature — Publish to Excel Web Services — that I need to use the Excel Web Services functionality.  How many versions of Excel 2007 are there?  According to this chart, there are 8 — yes, eight — 2007 Microsoft Office system suites.  They are:

• Microsoft Office Basic 2007
• Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007
• Microsoft Office Standard 2007
• Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007.

FWIW, Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 and Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 are both labeled as NEW!

Here are some things that inquiring minds want to know:

• What on earth was Microsoft thinking in coming up with 8 different Office suites?
• Why does Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 *not* include everything in the Microsoft Office suite?
• Why is Microsoft Office Ultimate listed between Professional and Professional Plus? 
• What’s next for Microsoft Office?  Microsoft Office Enterprise Minus 2007?  Microsoft Office Professional Plus Plus 2007?

Why should Microsoft stop at just eight?  Post your suggestions for future Microsoft Office System suites…