If you live in Outlook, as I do, and need help navigating your inbox and outside of the inbox, then you need Xobni. I upgraded a while ago, to Xobni Plus, soon after they launched the product during the 2009 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, back in July. It has been inbox bliss ever since.
In one recent scenario, I had some of our Microsoft PR folks ask for a Bio on some of the executives at one of my managed startups. Off to their web site. Hmm. Still in stealth mode, no executive team profiles. Oh, well, just use Xobni. Search in the Xobni toolbar. Find e-mail contact, and all of the officers, who are likely in their network. Click on the LinkedIn icon, click on view profile, and you have the bio of whoever's e-mail you are looking at.
I am here at Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference and I am pleased to announce that now, all of you enterprise developers have Xobni Enterprise to help you connect your customer systems with Outlook. I remember back in 1999, ouch, a decade ago, when I was at Great Plains, and Bill Gates was showing off a demo I did with some of our dev team where the accounting app built and shipped an order for a networking solution leveraging VBA automation across Word, Visio and Outlook. I know how critical it is to integrate enterprise applications into Microsoft Office and it was a key recipe to our success at Great Plains.
With Xobni Enterprise, not only to you get a centralized management infrastructure for deploying Xobni across your enterprise, you also get an extensibility framework for tying in your enterprise applications, enabled by Active Directory, into Outlook. For example, imagine the LinkedIn scenario that I described above, but if you worked at a hospital and your patient scheduling system was linked to Xobni, you would be able to see a patient's schedule and perhaps insurance profile based on an e-mail inquiry. With every e-mail, you can get the context of that individual, based on your own enterprise system. Of course, some assembly required. For more info on Xobni, just go here to learn more and reach out to contact Xobni if need be.
Oh yeah, and Xobni is a BizSpark One company too. So you wonder what a BizSpark One company looks like, watch Xobni and you should be able to figure it out.