- Plaxo: can’t live without it. I haven’t experienced the same issues as you; it works perfectly. And the de-duper is flawless. The two greatest aspects are instant updates to my address book in the background, and Pulse, which offers a whole perfect way to see all activity from all of my contacts. For more, see http://www.tretakoff.com/blogs/2007/08/closed-is-not-new-open.html

- LookOut. Uber power search for Outlook, making the built in search pathetic by comparison. Simply no better, but I have high hopes of Xobni, which I just installed (more later).

- Cloudmark’s SpamNet. I wish every e-mail account I have was as good as Gmail about eliminating spam, but if not, there’s SpamNet. Costs $40 a year, and offers the benefit of crowdsourcing: if a few people mark a message as spam, then the rest of SpamNet’s 500K+ subscribers all get it automatically marked as spam. You can also override it, and review messages, but wow, what a powerful tool.

- Salesforce for Outlook. Kludgy, cumbersome, and the word “sync” is not really in their vocabulary, but for getting emails into Salesforce, can’t find better.

The one I’m now playing with is Xobni. I like a lot of what it does: it automatically creates linkages between Outlook contacts, and offers great inline search. One of the best parts is it’s ability to show recent attachments exchanged with the contact in a sidebar; that’s 90% of what I want when I am looking for a contact. Great graphics, smooth installation, and more. Lots of potential. I do wish it looked at my Outlook contacts’ photos and imported them instead of asking me to do it manually, and I wish the search was more powerful, but I’ll give it time to see if it can displace LookOut.

I found Xobni great for its search capability, and also for examining email threads (80% of the email traffic is generated by 20% of your population; Pareto Principle). But it really slowed my system down, so I had to uninstall it.

We’ve worked long and hard on it, so I’m glad to see it getting some positive attention!

Take a look around our web site!

Cheers,
Nicholas

http://www.attensa.com/products/
http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/Default.aspx

Posting here after your pointer from Twitter (although I actually bookmarked your post in del.icio.us a few days ago)

I only use a handful of the Outlook plugins you reference: LinkedIn and Xobni. I like the LinkedIn plugin largely because it goes part way to solving the pain of having to recreate my graph of connections in a web app when it already exists in my email client. The grab function is also useful, although I find it interesting to note that this is not LinkedIn technology - it’s licensed from another company.

I find Xobni useful in a number of ways, but I also agree that they’re really good marketers, and have managed to gain a *lot* of visibility recently, perhaps more than their product is really ready for at this stage. For me the key useful points of Xobni are:

* Having all the conversations for each person easily accessible (and viewable through the Xobni conversation view pane) in a single place
* Having all the attachments exchanged with a user in a single place. (For me, this is actually surprisingly useful)
* The analytics app - though this is arguably just interesting to people like me who love seeing graphs and statistics!

Two Outlook plugins you haven’t mentioned that are worth a look are Taglocity (http://taglocity.com) and ClearContext (http://clearcontext.com). Taglocity allows you to tag messages in Outlook like you might in an email client like GMail. I’ve never made use of the categories in Outlook, and I’m still a new user of Taglocity, so it’s not yet clear how useful this is. I haven’t tried ClearContext, but it seems to have useful features, and the company’s CEO, Deva Hazarika is a smart guy who has lots of interesting ideas about improving the email experience.

Some ideas for thought.

Cheers,
Andrew

It opened up my eyes to a world of possibility. I enjoyed this post because I now have some ideas on trying out different software.

As far as the slowness issues with Xobni, I haven’t experienced much of a slowdown. I’m also using Outlook 2007 so that might be a factor. The coolness factor of Xobni is nice.

1) I remove the LinkedIn toolbar becuase it crashed Outlook too often. Instead, I bought Anagram 2.8.2 from Textual for $29.95, which is the exact sme software LinkedIn uses but is better. Anagram lets you grab contact info from any text-based application (Word, web pages, Pwerpoint, PDF, etc.) They also have plug-ins for Jigsaw, NetSuite, SalesForce and others.

2) I like Xobni only for the speed in which it lists other email communications I have going with the email’s sender. The hidden social grpah underlying my email is not valuable to me. For free, it is great; for a price, I would drop.

3) If you want to be listed on every spam blacklist, get the Plaxo toolbar. It serves no purpose other than give you the illusion of an updated contact list.

Keep the great posts coming.

GTD - i use this daily. it helps me stay on track with business and life. since i have very little physical paper cross my desk (except for bills ) the paper version of the system never really worked for me.

OutTwit - i’ve been getting more involved in Twitter, and this helps since i am in Outlook all day.

FBlook - same reason as you. so i dont have to leave outlook to know about my facebook.

I removed Xobni, when i realized why i got rid of it the last time; it just doesn’t work the way i do. also it takes up too my screen real estate for my tastes, and if you minimize it then it provides no value.

I’m going to try simplyfile, and i want to try huntress lite when the outlook 2007 version is available. both look very helpful.