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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.

Threaded conversations

Xobni claims that with one click you can see the thread of a conversation. Well, you can if you like all your email squashed into a sidebar. Outlook does threaded email already through its "By Conversation" view, which does at least attempt to show you which message is a reply to which other, whereas Xobni merely lists the messages in chronological order. I don't call that a "threaded conversation". The only thing new Xobni brings to the party is an ability to drag a slider control to change the level of detail you see about each message, letting you prune down all the messages to show just one or two lines.

Attachments

Xobni will list all the attachments you've sent or received from a contact, which can indeed be helpful, but Outlook 2007 or Windows Desktop Search will do the same, if not quite so automatically. Xobni, however, doesn't index the contents of attachments, which Outlook 2007 and Windows Desktop Search do. I suppose the trade-off here is whether you want it to list every attachment you've ever exchanged with Dick, every time you look at any email to or from Dick, or whether you'd prefer your computer to save its energy to list all those attachments only when you need to see them.

To add to my severe reservations, Xobni is currently incompatible with Avast antivirus, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise Edition, Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition, Panda Internet Security 2008, Cisco Security Agent, and possibly various other antivirus software as well, and the company isn't very forthcoming about the nature of these incompatibilities. It may stop the antivirus software scanning email or attachments, or may stop it working altogether. People are also reporting problems while using Xobni with mobile devices such as BlackBerrys, Sony Ericsson PC Suite, iPhones with MobileMe and Microsoft ActiveSync, when it can generate an error message but continue to work.

The last thing I don't like about Xobni is purely cosmetic: for a product that's supposed to integrate into Outlook, it looks absolutely nothing like its host. The Xobni bar has a stark black border and applies seemingly random, brightly-coloured headings to the sections of information. If they toned the colour scheme down and made it blend in with the blue, green or grey schemes of Office 2007, it would look a lot better.

Xobni Corporation is currently working on a paid-for, premium version, with additional features that will hopefully pay back all the venture capital that's been speculated on developing the free version available now. If you think Xobni might help you organise your email, it's a free download from www.xobni.com. Xobni has received a lot of enthusiastic coverage on the web, but I can't see the point of it at all, as Outlook 2007, or 2003 with Windows Desktop Search, do just about everything it does without the extra overhead of another indexer. But do try it for yourself and feel free to disagree.

DateDif() and DateDiff()

An email from Ron arrived in my inbox recently asking whether I'd heard of the "dateif" function in Excel, which could apparently tell you the difference between two dates. He'd tried to look it up in the Help text without any success, and wondered if I could offer any wisdom. Well there are two possibilities, Ron: the function "DateDiff()" (with two "f"s) certainly exists in Visual Basic, including the VBA in Excel and in SQL Server, while the function "DateDif()" (with one "f") exists in Excel and SharePoint for compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. Both functions do similar jobs, but they take different parameters in different orders.