Plugins for Microsoft Outlook – Xobni

Xobni is the latest Outlook plugin and has enjoyed a rush of very positive press the past several weeks. I have been using Xobni for several weeks and while I do think the product introduces a genuinely new approach to Outlook, it is not the be all end all of plugins.

Xobni’s claim to fame is the speed of the search and the introduction of the social aspect of your email. The product also includes impressive stats on your email such as how many messages are being sent in and out and with whom. They also contain interesting tidbits like the amount of time it typically takes you to respond to a message. Interesting stuff for about five minutes, after that you need to get back to work and quit looking at stats.

The most valuable thing this app introduces is the collection of attachments sent to and received from your contacts. This feature alone has saved me a lot of time. Because of this all I need to know is who an attachment came from to retrieve it immediately. I don’t have to know which email it was sent with. It really is just a list of attachments. That simple. Brilliant, but simple.

What I have learned these few weeks is Xobni alone with Outlook is not enough. The social aspect and the way the search results are populated have been too much information in many cases. Sometimes I’m just interested in messages I’ve sent to Jon. Not every message I’ve sent and anyone else we may have in common has sent. The search does not always deliver the right information either, but I guess no search truly does.

For me, the combination of Taglocity and Xobni has been an intriguing one and something I have been working with for approximately a week. This has introduced a bit of lag to Outlook but nothing I can’t live with, nor is it anything that is very persistent. What taglocity brings back is the ability to get granular on a project style basis. Xobni does nothing to answer this need (the tagging and grouping need). For now these two plugins will have to be enough.

Oh, currently Xobni is in closed beta but can be accessed via invite. If you search Google for an invite you’ll likely find one. That’s how I got in. The app is free, for now.

Plugins for Microsoft Outlook – Taglocity

I mentioned previously that a big drawback to the Outlook plugin ClearContext, for me, was the inability to place a message within multiple topics. The more I wrestled with this and worked around it the more I wished the system simply supported tagging.

Enter Taglocity.

Taglocity introduces to Outlook just what you would expect, tagging. It seems to get this done by taking advantage of the difficult to use categories already available in Outlook. You can tag items by using a tag cloud or by selecting from a list that populates as you type. The interface layout is very configurable. You can have the tagging pane display below or beside the preview pane while viewing the inbox. You can also float the tag cloud. In addition to the inbox you can tag items from the compose window, task creation or calendar creation.

Taglocity does right what ClearContext will hopefully correct in the next version. This is the ability to assign multiple tags to a single item. This means that the Sales Report email can be tagged with “2007 4th QTR ” as well as “Sales Commissions”. This is good stuff. Taglocity also makes filtering a view pretty painless and quick. You can select filter from the toolbar and select a tag, or multiple tags, and apply the filter. The filter also supports the AND and OR operators. This is a bit awkward to use but the approach seems pretty fresh. It is yet to be determined if this is a good thing or not.

Taglocity also supports AutoTags (the tags learn as you assign them) ActionTags (kick off an event, create a task, when a tag is assigned) TravellingTags (send tags along in the email). Each of these options are pretty compelling and make introducing the plugin into a workgroup environment a pretty easy one.

For the most part I really liked this plugin. My only concern is that it is not as user friendly as it could be and it does seem to impact performance a bit. With that being said, it is relatively safe to assume that most people that understand the value of tagging could figure it out. All in all I can see myself returning to this plugin and the price seems acceptable at $39 for the professional version.

• View the demo here
• Access the forums here

Plugins for Microsoft Outlook – ClearContext

It was just a short year ago that I really started to look for Outlook plugins that might make email management a little easier. Within the last few weeks I have found three. I didn’t dig into the history of each one of them enough to know how long they had been around but I’m guessing that the availability of Office 2007 has something to do with it.

Below I am going to give my opinion of one plugin, ClearContext. The next two will be covered in separate posts.

The first plugin I tried is ClearContext

From my experience, the idea behind ClearContext is to organize your email into categories or stages. In doing so the messages can be automatically filed away, deferred, delegated or turned into a task or calendar entry. Once an email has been categorized a dashboard view is available which allows a look at all messages, tasks or calendar entries for the project.

ClearContext does a lot of things right. The options available to you from when composing or reading a message are many, and are truly valuable. These include things like creating a task from the message or showing a related view which opens a window showing all messages within the category of the message you are viewing.

Unfortunately there are a few shortcomings that ultimately led me to uninstall ClearContext in search of an alternative. The first of these was that I could only place a message in a single category or stage. Ideally a message should be able to live in multiple categories without creating multiple copies of the message. The next issue was with the dashboard. While this idea is great, the execution is lacking. The dashboard is simply not as well organized or as functional as it needs to be. The last issue was how the messages auto categorize. If I categorize a message with a subject of “Sales Reports” to the “2007 4th QTR” category each message received with the same subject is also placed in that category. There are many instances when this simply won’t apply and will have to be worked around by resending the message to myself with an updated subject. This equals more work and defeats the purpose.

If these few shortcoming can be resolved (and they have certainly been mentioned by others in the ClearContext forums) this will be a very strong plugin.

• View a demo here
• View FAQ’s here
• Access forums here

Secure Login plugin – multiple logins

I’m a fan of the Secure Login plugin for Firefox. Occasionally when logging into a site I would get a prompt asking me to select which login to use. Both logins were the same with the exception of a number shown to the right of each login. I was able to select either and login just fine.

Eventually I got curious and went hunting for the reason why. It turns out the Secure Login plugin will display a login ID for each login form on the page. There is only one form on the page you say? Chances are very good there is a hidden form veiled by some ajaxy goodness.

To see the hidden form (and prove you aren’t losing it) select View | Page Style | No Style. This will strip all the styling from the page and show everything in it’s HTML glory.

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