Xobni: Email Search and More
July 15, 2008
The process of locating an email message remains–ah, shall I say?–uneven. I have seen demos of some nifty email search from Coveo, the Canadian search and content processing that is expanding its product portfolio and its top line revenue.
Xobni, an email extender, now integrates with Facebook. You can read about this function here. I am not a fan of social search, and I think that this type of function in an organization can deliver some surprises to senior management unless certain precautions are taken.
A client asked me if Xobni could be used as an alternative to Clearwell Systems. I have described Clearwell’s approach to content processing here. I am working on a more thorough analysis of Xobni now. My hypothesis is that Xobni is designed for the average email user. Clearwell, on the other hand, is tailored to the needs of attorneys and law librarians, among other specialists, working on legal matters
Xobni does provide email search, but its reach extends to email organization, in box management, and social functions. Xobni has a Googler on the staff and venture money in its bank account.
You can download a demo of the product here. Xobni runs on Windows and requires that you have Outlook 2003 or 2007 installed. The software runs on Microsoft Windows.
The company has a nifty demo here.
One of the two or three people who read this Web log alerted me to Xobni’s embedded entity extraction function. Xobni can parse emails and pull out phone numbers, among other entities. The software features a function that threads people together. This function is somewhat similar to Clearwell System’s email threading operation.
What I find interesting about Xobni is that sophisticated text processing operations are finding their way into what are consumer applications or mainstream business applications.
One risk to Xobni is that Microsoft embeds similar functions into the next release of Outlook. My experience suggests that Xobni is positioning itself to be purchased, possibly by Microsoft.
My concern with any application written for Outlook is that the personal store management issues loom large. Security simply does not exist when most users can copy a PST file and have a go at browsing email, sometimes another person’s.
Take a look at Xobni. There will be more interesting uses of text processing functions.
Stephen Arnold, July 15, 2008
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3 Responses to “Xobni: Email Search and More”
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PST files can be password proteced, but I doubt that feture is much used. The majority of PST files we index are unprotected. This could be due to the fact that the files are either stored in locations only available to the specific user, or contain archived content shat should be available to all users.
Andreas
I’m amused by the name “Xobni” – we really must be running out of .com domains if people are coming up with names like that……
Charlie,
I agree. One of my publishers added a Dot eu domain. My hunch is that useful urls might be available outside of the Dot Com fixation.
Stephen Arnold, July 15, 2008