Tim Howell’s Weblog

Microsoft Outlook is much maligned in the technical community, with critics lamenting its occasional lack of robustness and its variable performance.

The undeniable fact is that most information workers use Outlook. The product is installed on 350 million desktops worldwide, and represents a fertile market for third parties who can take advantages of its weaknesses to add value. Where there’s weakness, there’s always opportunity.

In the past few days, there have been a couple of developments that have really added to my Outlook experience:

• Xobni has been made available to a broader beta community. With all the recent discussion about the “social graph,:” Xobni (which is “inbox” spelt backwards) acknowledges that there is a significant amount of this data contained within email: the people you send email to are often those with whom you have a close relationship, more so than many “friends” you may attract in Facebook or elsewhere. Xobni makes it easy to make the most of these relationships, analysing the messages to pull out contact information, email messages and documents relating to an email address/contact. Very nicely done, without a performance hit.
• NewsGator also announced its entire range of RSS readers are free. I used NewsGator’s Outlook reader years ago when there were few options around. For a period I also used FeedDemon, but gave up because it was sometimes less than stable. Now these clients are both free and updated. And, as an aside, this is a fantastic strategic move by NewsGator who can use their client products to drive interest and use of their enterprise RSS offerings.

Lastly, I’d be remiss to not mention the Outlook support we provide at ActionThis. We’ve supported Outlook 2007 since launch, and quietly released our Outlook 2003 client at the end of 2007. If you’re looking for a service to help you get more things done, that works the way you do, then look at our free trial.