Nick Projects

This is a great free app that is perfect for anyone who has multiple exchange in boxes that they need to keep track of.   The application pretty much does what it sounds like,  it allows you to embed your email or calendar, or both on your windows desktop.  so that you don’t have to go clicking around when you need to find something.  I really don’t know why there is no default outlook view that allows you to see both your calendar and your email in one screen,  but there’s not and this allows you to get that and more.  

Check out the page below to download:
http://www.outlookonthedesktop.com/

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I understand that this is a fairly broad statement.  There is a lot of room to make outlook better.  I mean if outlook was half as efficient as Gmail people wouldn’t be flooding to the service.  Xobni allows more efficient processing of contacts and attachments.  It also provides some interesting statistics about your email use.  Finally it helps integrate your email data into a few social networking tools.

When you open xobni you will notice how the side bar fits nicely into outlook,  it’s more stylish than the typical outlook interface and it crams a ton of information into it’s small amount of screen space.  When you click on an email xobni gets to work.  It checks a few social networks to find information about the person and company that sent you a message.  Xobni then lets you know all of the file attachments and groups that the contact is associated with.

Groups is a fairly intelligent and unique feature that looks at all of the people who have ever been cc’d on an email chain that a contact was included on.  I correspond with a variety of IT groups so it is interesting to see who tends to get CC’d on a client’s issue or who may need to know about a specific problm impacting a client.  Also in a large organization it may keep you from having to dig up information about the chain of command for a contact.  Also,  it’s just cool data mining, although scary.

If that isn’t enough xobni will provide you trivia about your email usage, for example who emails you most often and who do you most often email you.  I think it’s amazing how many CRM features xobni is able to provide from a simple look at one’s email rather than using a overblown bloated system like Exchange Server.

Good Job Xobni.

http://www.xobni.com

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Delicious

The preciseness of one browser feature through the generations of different browsers has been a cornerstone of the internet.  The bookmark has truly stood the test of time and been a go-to function for many web users everywhere.   The problem is that now days most people use the web everywhere which makes the concept of a set of bookmarks locked into one computer a little dated.  Delicious has been around for several years now and is really one of the most simple and most effective bookmarking utilities out there.

Delicious not only pushes your bookmarks onto a website that you can access from anywhere.  Which is really enough to migrate from the crappy bookmarking functions built into most browsers, but, it adds an exceptionally effective tagging system for organizing your bookmarks.  This allows you to add several descriptors to your bookmarks to make them easy to find later.  For example, you could tag a Newsweek article about Russia as Newsweek, Russia, January,2008, or final report.  This would allow you to find all articles from January 2008 or all Newsweek articles very simply.  This simple organization allows you to bookmark anything that could be interesting because managing hundreds of bookmarks isn’t so cumbersome.

Another great feature of delicious is the ability to search bookmarks that other people have tagged.  This is a cool feature for two reasons.  While Google has a great relevancy indicator there is a gap between what people will click on and what they want to revisit.  If you are looking for a specific website say… wordpress templates it is great to be able to search within the sites that other people felt strongly enough to bookmark.  If for some reason you want to keep a bookmark private you have that option too.

These great features combined with simple to use browser buttons makes delicious a great substitute for a the antiquated browser based bookmark systems.

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