Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Xobni for Email Management

Bill Gates called Xobni, "The next generation of social networking."

I have read about Xobni, inbox spelled backwards, in a variety of product reviews but never had the chance to download it and give it a try. There are just too many cool applications to try but with enough word of mouth, I finally decided to try Xobni.

Sooo impressive!

It was a super easy download process with a quick MSFT Outlook reboot. (Just an Outlook plug-in.) Xobni then automatically indexed my email folders. From the Xobni side bar, I access my email analytics. Very slick!

Xobni creates a profile for every person that emails you. Within the profile contains information like relationship stats, contact info, social connections, threaded conversations and shared attachments. So if I can't remember the name of a document but remember who sent it to me, I simply pull up the person's profile in the Xobni side bar and locate the document in the "Files Exchanged" section. The same is true for email exchanges. If I can remember either the person I had the email exchange with or can remember keywords of the conversation, Xobni will do a comprehensive email search to help find the threaded email communication. (The Xobni search piece works like Google Desktop and very effective.)

Another interesting email analytic that Xobni provides is the time of day when you are most
productive with inbound/outbound emails, what these ratios are, as well as, how responsive people are and when they tend to reply back to your emails. I can also see when my emails peak during a given day, week or month and who sends me the most emails in that timeframe.

Xobni is also integrated with Linkedin.com, Facebook, Yahoo email, Hoovers and Skype. This is where the social networking aspect of Xobni comes into play. I can promote updates on my Linkedin profile, allow people to see new pictures I added to Facebook, look up company information from Hoovers all from the Xobni Profile that was created. I can also quickly check to see if the person has a profile on any of these sites and if they do, quickly add them as a connection.

Overall, Xobni is a great application to have. If you have issues with email management, want to capture back countless hours of searching for information that you never end up finding, download Xobni now!

Xobni Video Intro:http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/

Interesting Xobni Stats:
· 232.5B corporate emails sent and received daily, 72% are spam
· 133 emails sent and received per day by corporate users
· 701M corporate mailboxes worldwide
· MSFT Exchange has 59% market share in corporate email
· Next four years companies will spend $17B in email software
· Enterprise email costs an average of $435.85 per user per year

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert