Here at Xobni, we’ve been saying it for a long time: Outlook is the biggest email client in the world both in terms of engagement and total users. In terms of engagement it has more time in front of a user than any other application (including the web browser) on a business user’s machine. We also realized that while Outlook is huge and entrenched there are some big gaps in what it does and what people would like it to do. Enter Xobni.
We have spent the last 3 years taming Outlook and bringing lightning fast search and people-centric information organization to our users. This is something our users know, but is particularly interesting today in light of the announcement from Google where they announced support of Outlook with Google Apps. What does this mean? It means any Google Apps premium user can now use Outlook to read and write their email. This also means Google Apps users can now use Xobni with their Outlook.
Now Google Apps users can take advantage of these great Xobni features:
• Lightning Fast Search
• Email conversation threading
• Pictures, status, and profile information from Facebook, Linkedin & Hoovers
• Automatic phone number extraction
• Attachment management
• Powerful email analytics
• And more…
We spent the afternoon testing Xobni with the new Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and we are compatible. Now all of those Google Apps users out there that wanted to use Xobni, but couldn’t because their environment didn’t support Outlook, can now give Xobni a try. Welcome aboard!
Download Xobni for Free here
Hmmm, I understand Google’s move more as an effort to move users away from outlook and not vice-versa. Although this does mean that xobni will be able to interact with Google app servers in the short term, I would be careful to call this good news.
Looking at the big picture, I hardly expect that supporting fat email clients is part of their long-term strategy (see Google Wave).
Kudos to the xobni team: the email business is on the verge of great changes.
- Baptiste
Baptiste, on June 12th, 2009 at 9:46 am