A while back I wrote about how much I liked the Xobni email add on for Outlook. A short time later I heard rumors that Microsoft was buying them, but that appears not to be true at this point, though I still think it makes a lot of sense.  In the meantime, I have continued to use and be impressed with Xobni.  I have come to rely on its ultra fast search and the way it organizes threads of conversations and groups of people, as well as attached files.

An interesting thing though about Xobni. As I was given invitations, I would send them out to people I know.  Though many of them liked the functionality of the product, they said that it slowed their Outlook to a crawl and just did not think the performance hit was worth it.  Maybe I got used to the slowness or I am just not seeing it, but I did not see what they saw. In any event, many people were not using the product.

Well the Xobni folks just released a new version of the product that promises improved performance. I hope that helps those people who were complaining about this. It also offers several other new features, the biggest being LinkedIn integration.  I really like this LinkedIn integration as it gives you yet another layer of information on the people writing to you. All in all, I think this just makes the product more indispensable than it is already.  It is now available to the public, so I would encourage you to check it out for yourself!