Gallery

Snoozing at the OASIS

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 17:07

This month, Simon Jones looks into the maintenance of the ODF standard, and sizes up the new Outlook add-in Xobni.

Analysis

Xobni works out a ranking of who you email and who emails you most often. It also presents colourful graphs that show what time of day each contact sends you the most email; I really do wonder what possible use this kind of information is. Do I gain anything by knowing that "Joe Bloggs" is my 14th most prolific correspondent, or that he sends most email to me between 10am and 12am? I could probably name my top-five correspondents without any help, and also without counting in the various newsletters and spammers that Xobni appears unable to weed out. Beyond those five I can't say I care very much. As for knowing when someone usually emails me, Xobni claims this enables me to predict how fast I might get a response to an email I send, but if I need a fast response I'll send an instant message (IM) or - shock, horror - even pick up the phone. By using IM, I can see someone's presence information before I start, so I'll know if they're away, at their desk or busy, which is far more useful than knowing when they've most often emailed me in the past.

Scheduling

Click a link on the Xobni bar, and it will compose an email message to the selected contact containing brief details extracted from your calendar of when you might be available to meet or have a phone conversation. Outlook 2007 will do something similar, putting summary details from your calendar into a message, but it also attaches an ICS attachment that the recipient can use to see your availability in Day/Week/Month view, or import into their own calendar.

Web service integration

You could waste hours of time looking through the LinkedIn or Facebook profiles of your email correspondents that Xobni "helpfully" shows you. It also shows you your Yahoo mail, lets you place calls using Skype, and gets company information from "Hoovers" (which is apparently a division of Dun & Bradstreet). If I did use Yahoo mail for my personal email, I think I'd want to keep it separate from my work email, and I'm certain that any sensible network administrator I worked for would agree. Skype employs flaky, proprietary protocols for VoIP calls, routing them who-knows-where via its own peer-to-peer network. If I want VoIP integration, I'd like it everywhere in Outlook - and, indeed, in the rest of Office - not just in a separate pane on the side of Outlook. Also, I'd like it to use standard protocols, so I can use my own VoIP hardware or a VoIP service supplied by my ISP. Xobni is also incompatible with Microsoft Office Communicator, stopping it from working correctly with Outlook.

Phone numbers

People often put their phone numbers into the signature block at the bottom of their emails, and Xobni will find that data and show it to you along with other information about the sender. Unfortunately, it keeps all this gleaned information to itself - it doesn't write it to an Outlook Contact record, so it won't synchronise with your mobile phone. Ever heard the phrase "data island"?

Social networking

Xobni groups people together according to who CCs whom in on their emails, and says that this allows you to identify quickly a contacts manager, business partner or assistant. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you the relationship between the people at all, because you have no real idea whether these people being CCd are bosses, subordinates or peers of the sender. Once again, Xobni appears to advertise more than it actually delivers.