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Xobni outs Outlook inadequacies PDF Print E-mail
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by Stan Beer   
Tuesday, 06 May 2008
I still begrudgingly use Vista, even after making the mistake of retrograding my system to the monumental stuff-up called SP1. I still use Word and Excel 2007, although there are free alternatives that tempt me. However, I dropped Outlook months ago because it's an unacceptable resources drain. Can a new plug-in called Xobni change my mind?

Xobni (look at a mirror image of the word) is a free plug-in download for Outlook from a San Francisco-based company of the same name. In a nutshell, Xobni indexes and organises all the email information you have locked up in Outlook and then lets you search for it and find it quickly.

From what I've seen of Xobni, it looks to be an interesting tool that will make life easier for Outlook users. However, it will not make me and the many other former Outlook users switch back.

The fact of the matter is that Outlook has long ago passed its use-by date. Since transitioning to Gmail and Google Calendar, I would never again consider using a desktop based system like Outlook. Others say similar things about Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Calendar, just in case anyone thinks I'm especially beating the drum for Google.

I have a pretty powerful desktop computer with 4GB RAM, a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and an Nvidia GeForce 256MB graphics card. So when Outlook started keeping me waiting while new emails were loading and folders were synchronising, I naturally got more than a little peeved. An email client shouldn't need a supercomputer to run with acceptable performance. That alone was enough to make me look for an alternative. However, poor performance was by no means the only bugbear.

As any traveller who uses a computer while on the road will know, having full access to your emails and calendar is mandatory. It is possible to configure your Outlook system so that you can have access remotely but it's messy and anything but intuitive. Desktop email and calendar clients are simply not made to be shared and accessed from computers other than the one on which they reside.

In contrast, since using a Web-based mail and calendar system I have felt a wonderful sense of freedom. I don't even need to own a computer to get access to my emails and appointments. Microsoft beware because the moment Google gets its documents and spreadsheets products up to an acceptable standard, I'm taking my entire office online and I suspect so will many others.

Having said all of this, it is true that Web mail clients such as Gmail do suffer from some of the same organisational problems as desktop based clients like Outlook - perhaps even more so. That's why it seems a pity that Xobni is focussing its efforts exclusively on Outlook.

With hundreds of millions of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users, there's a ready made market for enterprising plug-in cloud computing developers to emulate desktop-bound Xobni and help us to organise our Web-based information. Or perhaps the young startup Xobni, which has so far refused Microsoft's acquisition advances, is already thinking along those lines itself?
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Comments (9)Add Comment
...
written by Thunder, May 06, 2008
Stan... you've lost me... I use MS Outlook every day, at work and at home. I have no idea what you are talking about with it being slow and unresponsive. That simply is not true. The only time you have to wait a little bit is when it is downloading large file attachments from the mail server. If your incoming emails are simple text, they download into your inbox very quickly.

When you sign into Hotmail or Gmail, you just see the summary of each email... you do not get the attachments straight away, which is why you may think it ''seems'' more responsive, but in reality, when you want the attachment on a web-based service, you must wait for it to download, just the same as Outlook.

My opinion? I find my own web based email clients annoying because when you click from one email to the next email, you have to wait for a new web page to load. In Outlook, the shift from one email to the next email is instant.

I think you were a bit unfair in this article, and did not compare the overall pro’s and con’s of both methods. Different people will like different features in each method, and ultimately, it is a personal choice.
...
written by Stan Beer, May 06, 2008
Hi Thunder

I can only talk from my own experience. Perhaps I get more emails than you - I am a journalist after all. However, I can tell you Web-based clients kill desktop clients on the road. I still have Outlook on my computer and occasionally use it to retrieve emails from past times. As soon I have finished using it, I kill the process because it slows my system down noticeably.
...
written by Vietnam, May 06, 2008
Stan my man, somethings up. You must have a virus huh? My outlook has no probs.
...
written by Clare, May 06, 2008
I'm convinced to give Xobni a try. Installing it as I type
...
written by Overseer, May 06, 2008
Hello Stan, I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 everyday. While I am at work, I receive about 100 e-mails every day. Touch wood, but I have no problems thus far. I too am a bit unsure what you mean by it being slow.

The web based e-mail programs are good for people who go on holidays, etc., but business people who travel would typically take their own laptop with them. I have the free web e-mail accounts, and I also have a proper POP3 account through my ISP. I have tried both (who hasn’t). I prefer to use my POP3 account with Outlook as my primary service.
...
written by Question Everything, May 06, 2008
Holy smokes... that Clare person above doesn't take much to convince. Perhaps Clare, you should have searched for a few separate reviews from other web sites before you took the plunge on new 3rd party software.
...
written by Light Bulb, May 07, 2008
I do not understand this article. Am I dumb? No I am not. Maybe you are joking about the web email progams being the gun? They are as slow as! Hotmail even place a notice on their Live pages as they load which says "Taking too long? Try the classic version". Now what does that tell you mister journalist?
...
written by Overseer, May 07, 2008
Hello Stan. Extending on from my previous post yesterday, I was thinking today (on the train :-) about your article and why you may have come to the conclusion that Outlook is slow (for you). Then I wondered whether you have Outlook configured to connect into your Hotmail or Gmail accounts. If so, that is why you experience poor performance. I tried using Outlook to connect into the free web-based e-mail programs but it was a slug, so I stopped doing that and use Outlook for POP3 accounts only.

I reiterate what I said yesterday: my POP3 account with my ISP flies in Outlook with no problems whatsoever.

So... I wonder if you use Outlook to grab your Hotmail/Gmail e-mails? If so, problem solved.
...
written by Glen, May 09, 2008
I think there are two issues here. Outlook 2007 is known to be slower then previous versions. We use it daily with larger amounts of email on both POP3 accounts and an excvhange account. We do find that it has pauses that mean waiting, especially if you want to read mail while others are being downloaded. Saying that I find it still better then previous versions for its features.

On the Xobni issue, we have Windows desktop search installed on out systems and it indexes our data drives AND email so that we can quickly search for emails. I have a mailbox that is over 1 gig and it takes about 5 seconds to do a search on through the entire email file as well as the archive pst. We did have google desktop installed for the search, but the Microsoft one gives you the results in catergories (mail, docs, pictures) much better then the Google search engine style results.

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