With Xobni Enterprise, I.T. admins can manage the deployment and permissions surrounding the plugin's use via a web-based portal that provides access to user's profiles as well as a groups management feature. By placing different subsets of users into groups, I.T. can deploy custom versions of the plugin to different users. For example, everyone company-wide may get a plugin that offers LDAP integration, but only sales professionals would receive the version that connects to Salesforce. Admins can also choose to "switch off" other previously default integrations such as the Facebook and Twitter extensions.

To push the plugin out to end users, Xobni Enterprise offers an MSI file and registry settings that can be modified as necessary.

Extensions for Salesforce, SharePoint, and More

At launch time, Xobni's Solution Provider Program has partnered with a number of Enterprise vendors to provide extensions and integrations for their new system. The current list of partners includes Atlius Consulting, Cogent, Echo Lane and Interdyne BMI, which help Xobni integrate SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce CRM platforms among others.

The new service also comes with an Extensions Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows in-house developers to write their own extensions to integrate other platforms beyond those which are currently available. Xobni suggests this SDK could be used to deliver company news and information from an internal corporate portal, specific business application, or any other web service.

Other Features

Another general enhancement available with this version of the plugin is Xobni's expanded search capabilities that allows users to search calendar appointments, tasks and archived PST files. The search feature includes advanced filters which let users find results by limiting searches to email contents only or the To:, From:, and  or Subject: fields of their email messages. Users can also access their entire contact database from the auto-complete field in Outlook's "Compose" window.

Pricing

The company webpage for Xobni Enterprise does not include any pricing information, only a link to "Request More Info" from the company. This is likely because each Xobni system is being somewhat custom-built in terms of price because there are additional costs to run the pre-defined extensions created by the company. Depending on which extensions a company chooses to deploy and however many users will be using them, the overall cost of the Xobni Enterprise system will vary. However, the company informs us that the system starts at $30 per user per year with volume discounts available.

Xobni has seen over 3 million downloads of their plugin, including both free and paid versions, since their initial debut. This new offering represents the second revenue stream for the company, the first being the launch of Xobni Plus, a premium version of the plugin that sells for $29.95. They also claim to have a presence in 80% of Fortune 500 companies thanks to employee adoption outside of the traditional I.T. infrastructure, a trend known as self-provisioning and one that has steadily increased over the years.

Companies looking to maintain control over what their employees can do on their company computers often end up having no choice but to purchase the enterprise services provided by the startups their employees are already using in order to once again centralize control within I.T. If Xobni's adoption across the enterprise is as strong as they claim, they may soon have several companies looking to implement the Xobni Enterprise Service so they can do just this. Other companies may be tempted to try the product for the first time now that it offers I.T. friendly tools and enterprise level support.

More information about Xobni Enterprise is available here on the company's website.

Surprisingly, despite Google's success in online and web advertising, one of the company's key ad vehicles is the billboard. The company has reserved 4 billboards in major US cities and will run a new Google App-related message each day for a month. The campaign is expected to celebrate the benefits of Gmail spam protection, filters, high storage limits, email threads, Google chat, Google Docs and of course, what the company has always done well, search.

In an effort to rally advocates, the company has set up a Google Apps "Spread the Word" site where enthusiasts download marketing collateral and promote Google Apps within the workplace. The site slogan is, "Join the movement. Spread the word. Go Google." The page is meant to help employees convince their IT administrators to switch to Google Apps, but I can't help thinking this campaign could potentially backfire.

While Google Apps and Firefox share a common enemy in Microsoft, the project targets are completely different. Firefox enthusiasts advocate on behalf of the company directly to their friends and family. Meanwhile Google Apps enthusiasts are asked to influence the very people who are already more qualified to make IT-related infrastructural decisions. In other words, if you've ever seen a non-technical employee tell an IT administrator how to do his/her job, the outcome probably wasn't pretty. Nevertheless, because Google's services are extremely user-friendly, some great enterprise and business-level endorsements might better influence a workplace service transition. One testimonial from Vivek Kundra is particularly glowing.

Currently serving as the United States Chief Information Officer, Kundra is responsible for the country's e-government and information technology. In 2008, as the CTO of the District of Columbia, he endorsed Google Apps as a cost-effective, scalable and easy-to-use collaboration platform. He deployed the service across the district's 86 agencies to help its police officers, fire fighters and public servants. Using a number of Google applications including Google Earth, maps, documents and email, Kundra has been celebrated for bringing efficiency and cloud-based infrastructure to the District of Columbia. His work earned him a spot as a key advisor on President Obama's transition committee on technology issues and from there he was appointed the federal CIO.

Since its launch in early 2008, the software has been offered as a free download to anyone looking to capitalize on the hidden social network in their inbox. But in March of this year, we got wind that things were going to change when Xobni announced their plans to work on a premium version after receiving a new round of funding.

What's Worth Paying For? Xobni Says Search

It's interesting that the company thinks the critical missing feature that users will be willing to pay for is search, especially since Microsoft Outlook includes some pretty robust search tools of its own. In Outlook 2007, for example, a user can configure "Search Folders" which let you easily create a custom query for things like "mail from specific people" or "mail with attachments" or anything else you can dream up. Outlook also offers instant search that finds and highlights keywords in your messages. More recently, though, you may have heard of another popular search feature when Google broke it: Windows Desktop Search. Outlook ties into this search service which lets the Windows OS index your emails so computer-wide searches will also return email results.

So how is Xobni going to improve on the built-in capabilities of Outlook? Essentially, by adding tools and features that make email search more like cramming a real search engine into your inbox.

New Features in Plus

Xobni Plus's query builder makes it easier to configure advanced queries -similar to how search folders might operate. However, unlike search folders, these queries can be built on the fly for one-time use, not saved forever as a new Outlook folder. You can search for exact phrases or keywords and you can even perform Boolean queries.

Xobni is also letting you search entire conversation threads at once instead of having to search your entire inbox or a particular folder, as in Outlook. And thankfully, you can now search through archived PSTs, too. 

Another new search feature is the ability to search calendar appointments and tasks, an interesting choice for a premium product since Outlook's own instant search feature is available in all Mail views, including Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks.

The only feature debuting in Xobni Plus that's not really about building a specific search query is AutoSuggest. However, it's somewhat search-related. If you've ever forgotten the name or email of someone you need to contact, remembering only that they work at a specific company for example, you can use this feature to type in what you can remember (like the company name) and Xobni will display all matching results ranked on how often you and that person communicate. That's a big improvement on the typical autocomplete functionality found in most email clients today.

Why Pay When Outlook Includes Search of Its Own?

Despite some similarities between Outlook's native features and Xobni, the improvement here is Xobni's easier-to-use UI that places everything you need in its sidebar. Also, it's worth noting that Outlook's own search may be a headache for some users, especially if you go by the top Google results for "Outlook 2007 search" which returns tons of links like "search problem," "fix for slow instant search," and "search busted."

Now that the premium software is available, the question is whether or not Outlook users are really struggling so much with Outlook's own search features that they would be willing to pay nearly $30 for these improvements. (Our guess is that they are.) We're a little surprised that the Plus offering didn't incorporate more "social" features, like improvements to their Facebook integration or some sort of microblogging functionality, but we suppose that at the end of the day these sorts of things are probably less useful to the business user than simply finding email fast is.

To buy the new version of Xobni Plus, you can go here.

But love? Not so much. Google, intent on building its enterprise channel, has recognized that many Outlook users - particularly enterprise users - aren't ready to make the leap to the cloud and to Google Apps. But maybe, just maybe, Google Apps Sync is what it will take to woo them.

Not Quite Gears

"Although we use the same protocol as gears, we don't use gears per se," explained Vander Mey. "It's all saved in outlook PST files. From a technical level [there] is a MAPI provider; when you connect to Exchange we have built our own MAPI provider - we just change what's going out on the wire - as opposed to licensing from Microsoft."

Key Features:

E-mail, calendar and contact sync
Synchronize all Outlook fields in both directions, keeping them up-to-date; Uses a Google native e-mail protocol.

Free/Busy and Global Address look up
The Global Address List feature lets you search for and access e-mail addresses of users and resources in your domain.

Simple, user-driven data migration
Letting users move data to Google instead of having to wait for IT admins.

Google Apps Sync will be launched this afternoon.

You'll need Outlook 2003 SP3 or 2007 SP2 (or SP1 with a hotfix), running on Windows XP SP2 (with selected hotfixes) or Vista SP1 (with a hotfix).

If you want to see how Google Apps for Microsoft Outlook works, watch this three minute video.

In this release, Xobni has also included additional user controls which will allow users to better customize Xobni's behavior. This feature is designed to help people with "underpowered" computers to take advantage of the plugin. (Can we say netbooks?) The controls let you customize the indexing times and configure a delayed load when Outlook starts, among other things. Although we never did formal tests on the Xobni plugin ourselves besides just using it on our own machines (where it performed just fine), we heard of some anecdotal evidence where people had claimed it slowed Outlook down. For those who reported the slowness issues, these performance enhancements and configuration tools will likely be a great benefit.

As for the funding, the company says the money will be used for continuing development of the product and will help them proceed with work on a premium version of the software, slated for release this summer. The investment from BlackBerry Partners Fund brings the total raised in Xobni's Series B funding to over $10 million and adds BlackBerry Partners Fund Partner, Rick Segal, to Xobni's board of directors. Xobni closed the first part of the Series B in January 2009, led by Cisco Systems ($5 million).

You can download the new version of Xobni here.

1. 99% of Spam was gone - poof. I had foolishly once put my email address on a web site in clear form where it could be collected by spammers and one of my accounts, managed on an Exchange server, was overrun with spam. Once I went to Gmail, no problem. I am sure I am missing a few valid mails that got incorrectly seen as spam, but that will eventually correct itself as people contact me some other way. When I am contacting somebody new by email I always now assume that overzealous spam filters stop my mail getting received, so I ask a contact who knows that person to forward my mail. That is a small price to pay for getting rid of spam and using contacts that way is obviously good for business as well.

2. Searching was much easier. There is debate about whether Outlook or Gmail has better search. Personally I find Gmail search way better than Outlook but that can be subjective and habit is a major factor in productivity. What I know for sure is that having both Gmail and Outlook makes search a real pain - you have to search in both mail systems if you don’t know which one you had used. That is significant. When time comes to make a decision, which one do you axe? I had that personal tipping point and switching to Gmail was a no-brainer. It just looks like a better long term way to go.

The reason Gmail looks like a better long term way to go is quite simply mobility. I can use Gmail from anywhere. I can change PC without even thinking about conversion. I don’t need to worry about not having access to my laptop. If my laptop is stolen/lost/destroyed and I have not been totally diligent on back-ups, no worries on that score.

I have some worries about a) losing connectivity and b) occasional performance/reliability issues on Gmail (which could get worse as they get more users). I hope that Gears will enable temporary offline use to mitigate those issues, but I have not tried that yet.

So Gmail as a client is a done deal. What about Gmail as the server? I don’t usually think about that level of IT. I am involved with a new start-up that needs to make that decision. We can run Exchange internally. Or we can use a hosted/managed version of Exchange. I am sure the future is with hosted/managed. Who can possibly view email management as core, who wants that internal overhead? So I was interested to see this thread on Slashdot. The news is that:

“LA hosting company DreamHost, which hosts more than 700,000 web sites, is encouraging its customers to use Google’s Gmail for their e-mail, rather than the DreamHost mail servers. DreamHost is continuing to support all its existing e-mail offerings, but said in a blog post that email is “just not something people are looking for from us, and it’s something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.” DreamHost addresses a question about Google that has vexed many web hosting companies: is Google a useful partner, or a competitor that intends to make “traditional” web hosting companies obsolete? In this case, partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?”

When you realise that you can easily use Gmail with your domain, the issue of appearing unprofessional in a corporate context by using an @gmail.com address goes away. For a start-up looking for a no hassle way to do email, this seems like a no-brainer.

Microsoft is clearly well aware of the threat to Exchange, which is why they launched their own Hosted Exchange offering in July 2008. This will put Microsoft in head to head competition with their hitherto partners who offered third part Hosted Exchange offerings. This game is now clearly all about economies of scale on those giant server farms, so we are likely to see email server hosting consolidate down to a handful of companies in the next few years. This is the normal and expected lifecycle for a commodity market such as email serving.

In this battle, the email client does matter, if only psychologically. If you feel wedded to Outlook you will probably go Exchange for your server. Gmail looks like it is moving purposefully from personal mail into small business. Hosted Exchange is also going after small business. Large enterprises switching off Exchange is still years way. The battle ground is around small business. The clear winner - small businesses that can profit from some real competition by the big guys.

Judging from the change in business models, however, it would seem that Calgoo couldn't attract enough paying users. It's interesting that Calgoo couldn't make its 'freemium' model of free basic services and paid advanced feature work.

According to Calgoo, it is making its products available for free in order to "move to in-calendar advertising business models." While Calgoo hasn't outlined what these in-calendar ads would look like, this move is also consistent with the overall trend on the web towards advertising financed products.

As Svetlana Gladkova also points out in this context, users have simply become so accustomed to not paying for anything on the web that even charging for premium features is becoming very difficult for some companies. Calgoo must have surely felt the same pressure. In the short run, this is probably to the users' advantage.

Xobni, a company obviously catering to business users, have, as of today, launched a new version of their Outlook plugin. Needless to say, the Xobni team really knows their audience because this new version is offering built-in support for LinkedIn, the social network designed for business use.

With the new LinkedIn integration, Xobni now automatically shows a contact's current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and contact photo in the app's sidebar. This is especially helpful for those who receive a lot of email from new contacts or have a hard time putting a face to name. Along with the LinkedIn support, Xobni still offers their core features - fast people and attachment search, threaded conversations, and automatic contact profiles.

Download Xobni

Xoopit

Depending on how comfortable you are handling over your email login information, you may find Xoopit either a major security risk or one of the more useful web applications you've seen in a long time. Marshall has argued that Xoopit is proof that Gmail needs a better API, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use Xoopit anyway because...well...finding attachments is hard.

The service, which came out of private beta just last week, offers a Gmail plugin that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files - all of which are accessible with one click from the new toolbar added to the top of your Gmail inbox. You can also use the addon to find photos, videos, or files sent you by a specific person, and, as you type their name in the box provided, Xoopit helpfully auto-completes the entry.

On the Xoopit homepage, things get a little more interesting. Here, the latest items from your email display in a familiar lifestream-like view that practically has you looking for the "like" button. To the side of the screen, the people who send you the most items are listed and linked to - and those results may surprise you, bringing new insight into what's really going on in your inbox. (Forwarders of chain emails be warned - you've been identified!)

At the time of launch, the Xoopit addon, which is available as a Firefox plugin, did not support Firefox 3, but over the weekend, the Xoopit team added that support, which now makes it worth a download...at least for those who aren't too security conscious.

Download Xoopit

For a demo of Xoopit, you can check out this video:

Upgrading the Inbox

Considering how much of our days, if not our lives, are spent dealing with the non-stop influx of email, it's nice to see some applications that are helping us make our inboxes more efficient while also mining them for important data. Microsoft Outlook, due to its nature of being desktop software, has always lent itself to the addition of plugins - even social ones like OutSync (facebook/Outlook sync) - but the idea of adding plugins to our web inboxes is still relatively new territory.

Because so many people use Gmail, we've seen the innovation begin there. First there was Gina Trapani's Better Gmail Firefox plugin, which arose from a collection of Greasemonkey scripts. Then even Google's Gmail team got in on the act earlier this month with their launch of Gmail Labs, the experimental features you can enable from your "Settings" page. Although some of those features are certainly less useful than others, the fact that Google is also hopping into the inbox addon game means there is definitely growing interest in this area (and say what you want - those "superstars" are really helpful).

Hopefully, the growth in this area will continue and we'll soon find that Google Labs, Xobni, and Xoopit were just the forerunners of the upgraded inbox trend.

In that context LinkedIn's InMail just seemed like an irritation. However, I am now re-evaluating that. Partly because I am thinking that I may need something like SalesForce, just a basic contact manager. There are many good SalesForce alternatives; we are totally spoiled for choice in that area. But that seems like one more thing to manage/learn and possibly pay for (or use a free service that may not survive).

So, LinkedIn doing both starts to make sense. With a few provisos. The first is a pricing scheme I can agree to. That does not include Free, I don't trust Free in this context, because it too often means, "lock you in and then charge you too much later." Nor will I pay $20 or $50 per month for something that limits how many mails I can send.

Their $60 per year plan sounds good. That's $5 per month. But I would want unlimited mails for my own contacts whether they are in LinkedIn or not. They can still charge me for the right to send mails to people in LinkedIn who I don't know, which sounds like wonderful spam control. So for $60 I get Gmail like functionality. OK, InMail is a long way from Gmail, but all that is is some email software, and I am sure LinkedIn can license, buy or build some good webmail software, ideally with offline sync capability from day one.

Not only would this give them a really solid subscription revenue base, but every email would be viral marketing for LinkedIn.

Why would I use this rather than Gmail? Four reasons:

1. Automatic contact management, particularly the self-updating nature (i.e., a contact changes jobs and I can see that and their contact details are always up to date).
2. One less system to use, as LinkedIn is becoming enough of a habit that it now takes time each day.
3. Built-in spam filter based on white-list. Yes, Gmail has great spam control, but it is still a total pain in Outlook.
4. LinkedIn actually helps me sell/recruit/buy through networking. That is a totally different level of value proposition from just helping me to send emails or manage contacts.

Could InMail send/receive mail outside LinkedIn? Of course it could. Email standards are open.

I can envision all kinds of cool CRM 2.0 type features based on the social graph.

Of course, all this is possible because Microsoft has been asleep at the switch. It has been apparent for many years, to many people that the real social graph is in the email system and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange is where biz people keep their emails. Microsoft could have done this already, easily. Possibly they still could, but they are leaving it a bit long.

I am sure Google gets the opportunity. They have the same social graph within Gmail. I wonder what they have brewing in their labs?

Once you make the decision to break the Outlook habit as I have already done, the next step to something like InMail is not a very big one. Already my contact database in LinkedIn is more up to date and clean than my Gmail one.

Like all social networks, LinkedIn is under pressure to "open up." They may be be able to push back on that front if they create enough value so that biz people decide to live in LinkedIn as opposed to living in Outlook and SalesForce or the equivalent CRM. That would save hard $ from those services, so its a good recession play as well. LinkedIn has some weak plays for RSS aggregation, but they can easily do something better that makes LinkedIn more like a fully customizable start page.

LinkedIn could be the big IPO story that will validate this market and the one that we've been waiting for since Google went public.

Xobni initially launched in September 2007 at the TechCrunch40 Conference. After being downloaded thousands of times in the hours after launch, they closed the doors and went into a private beta period. During this time, they kept the number of beta testers low while focusing on refining Xobni's features and responding to user feedback. Some of these adjustments were documented on the company's blog, like the removal of the "organize" tab from Xobni's UI, which was decided to be too much of a distraction to the core product.

Back in January, we noted that their blog had hinted at expanding beyond Outlook to other platforms, but, besides a clever April Fool's Day prank where they announced support for Pine email, no additional news regarding future supported platforms has been announced. While this leaves many email users in the cold, for those who work in the corporate world - where Outlook is still heavily used - Xobni's public beta will be of great help, allowing them to quickly find and expose the data trapped in their inbox.

To gain access to the public beta, just visit the Xobni homepage. You can also learn more about Xobni via the video below:

The new program, Inbox 3.0, offers several new features including enhanced relevancy, attention reporting, easy subscription adding, flag synchronization and a redesigned UI.

You may remember back in January, NewsGator began giving away many of their products for free, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and others available here. What you may not have realised is why.

As it turns out, the power of their newly expanded community is being utilized to form the backbone of the company's relevance engine. When you flag an item, email a clipping, save a clipping, etc., this anonymous usage data is sent back to NewsGator. (This was fully disclosed by the company and can be turned off, if desired. Read more in the FAQ).

By combining this "relevance metadata," NewsGator can provide their users, like those using Inbox 3.0, with the most relevant news and information while also keeping track of what subscriptions you care most about and allowing you to export this information in APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) so it can be shared with other services.

If you go to "My Reading Habits," from the toolbar, you have the option to export as either APML or OPML. The APML option sorts your feeding by attention - that is by how much you interact with the feed. This APML file can then be imported into other programs.

Exporting Attention Data

NewsGator's Nick Bradbury is a big proponent of APML, having joined the APML Workgroup back in October. Unfortunately, though, although the program exports APML, there is no import APML feature, nor was there a way to import the APML to my other NewsGator program, FeedDemon. However, according to an older post on Bradbury's blog, import is supposed to be the next step they focus on, so we hope to see import support soon.

In addition to the attention and relevancy improvements, the new version of Inbox 3.0 offers a new UI which is designed to fit in more with Outlook 2007's look and feel, and easy subscription adding. Also, the flag synchronization feature syncs flagged items between different computers running Outlook but also between NewsGator's Mac and PC RSS readers – NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

For many office workers, a good part of the day is spent in Outlook, so Inbox 3.0 will be a nice find for them, especially because the program, like the desktop readers, is free.