I’ve seen this button before but never really thought about it I guess when I was editing a contact in my address book in Outlook 2007.

When you click on it, it lets you browse through all of you contacts and you can add a contact into this field.

My question is what’s it for?

Is it letting me link contacts to each other in some sort of relationship? Are there tasks and controls I can use to manipulate or view contacts by their relationships assigned in this field?

I can’t even find anything about it online when I did a quick search so I thought I’d post it here and see if anyone of you have been using it or know what it can be used for somehow.

Let me know, and I’ll keep searching as well.

Post from: EveryJoe

What’s the "Contacts" Button for in Contact Edit for Outlook 2007?

Today as I was working on developing some items for clients, I was reminded of another small frustration I have with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. The application is built for email management right? I use it to quickly and efficiently send emails to friends, family, business colleagues, prospective clients, etc.

Why isn’t the “Send Email” link one the first level menu when you right-click on a contact in your address book? In fact, why should I have to right-click on a contact at all. There should be a little email envelope icon right next to their name or something that would immediately let me start an email to that person don’t you think?

Is that just too obvious? Am I missing something?

Post from: EveryJoe

Making It Easier to Send Email to Contacts

The service is now out of private beta and anyone can download and install it to see for themselves.

I’ve heard some people say that Outlook slowed down tremendously after they installed it, but I haven’t noticed anything like that up until this point during my usage of the application.

With the new public release they’ve also made just some slight appearance modifications to the Xobni information pane.

I don’t think the search function needed to be made quite so prominent in the new, updated user-interface design. Maybe that’s because I’ve not been a big user of the general search features. I more regularly use the network, conversations and files information.

Xobni had some news coverage in the New York Times as well if you’re interested in what some other people besides myself think about the product.

In the article, Jeff Bonforte, expressed interest and goals in expanding the reach of Xobni into other e-mail and communication clients:

Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlook. Jeff Bonforte, a 35-year-old former Yahoo vice president, joined Xobni as chief executive in February. He plans to expand Xobni’s reach to various e-mail programs, like the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin.

That would be pretty slick to be able to type in a name in Xobni and it be able to read my e-mail for that contact’s information regardless of which one of my e-mail accounts I had been communicating with the individual.

The only problem I can see is I don’t keep my e-mail around for very long in other e-mail clients. So, not sure if Xobni would keep a history of messages that I’ve already deleted from my system. Not sure how they would.

Post from: EveryJoe

Xobni Goes Public and New Design

Since I’ve been playing with Xobni more one question I’ve come across is why doesn’t Xobni use Outlook’s own contact photo information?

That was somewhat of a rhetorical question because I didn’t really need an answer and it wasn’t worth completely pursuing for an answer.

What it did do though was make me wonder where Outlook keeps it’s contact photo information? I’m curious because I love that my phone displays the contact photo on CallerID when that person calls me. It makes it really easy to see who’s calling you with a quick glance at your phone if you’re in a meeting or something.

For working with the photos themselves I put them in “My Pictures” but I don’t necessarily want to keep all of those sitting in there. Can I delete them? Should I bury them somewhere in the file system and just remember where they are?

I couldn’t find any information about the location of this stored information on the Internet. Anybody know? Oddly enough the other information I couldn’t find in the help section is the default minimum maximum size of the image for processing.

It’s a series of questions now though, because then I started wondering what it would take (or why it didn’t already) for the .vcf card attachments to include a photo of the contact person. What would be even cooler is if there was an option for you to include people’s avatars from things like twitter.

Post from: EveryJoe

Outlook Contact Photos

In a quick summary; Xobni incorporates itself into Outlook as an additional pane of information. It collects and efficiently presents information related to the selected sender or recipient of the e-mail that is chosen.

Let’s take a quick review of the different sections of information available in the main info pane of the Xobni panel.

First, you can see a search box. Pretty self-explanatory. Quickly find text in your e-mail program. Performing a search will quickly find any contact or e-mail containing the text included.

The top orange bar provides the contact’s name (which I’ve got blurred out for privacy). The next area shows you the time period and quantity of emails received from this contact. This allows you to quickly determine when you’re most likely to catch them at their computer and potentially get a quicker reply to your e-mail. If there is a contact photo it is displayed here as well. The last part in this section is a total count of received and sent e-mails to this contact.

The next area allows me to quickly contact this person via Skype, schedule a meeting or send a brand new e-mail.

Next we have a small network identified for this contact. This includes anyone that has been included as a recipient in an e-mail to or from the contact. Very simple idea, but also a powerful benefit to quickly determine other related contacts that could be a resource for information related to a previous e-mail. If I hover over the person’s name I can see their e-mail and phone number if they exist in my address book already (identified by the orange person icon), or just their e-mail address if they aren’t currently in my address book.

The next section is a brief recap of recent conversations I’ve had with the contact. This allows me to quickly scan a history of e-mails related to the person. I can hover over the message and read the body of the message in the tool tip, or I can click on an e-mail and the Xobni pane will show me a small preview of the e-mail header, subject, body, signature, everything including quick access to reply, reply all, forward, etc.

As you can see in the example, if there are multiple messages in the conversation thread, when I click on the message I can get a brief summary of each message include in the conversation history. Again, extremely handy and intuitive collection of information.

The last section displayed is a list of attachments that have been included in previous e-mails with the selected contact. How many times have you been reading a response to a message and it references an earlier attachment with some kind of data in it you needed. Now you no longer have to exit out of the message you’re reading to go find the attachment with the information you need out of the attachment. If you hover over the attachment information you can see the text of the e-mail message that included the attachment. To open the document in it’s default viewer all you need to do is click on it.

Another feature I haven’t even talked about is the Xobni Analytics that’s available. Loads of graphs and charts providing information like:

• Daily summaries
• Mail traffic
• response times
• unique contacts
• folders used
• subjects
• recipient types
• flag status
• context of e-mails
• and lots more

Here’s a video from Xobni that does a great job of really highlighting everything quickly

You can find out more specific details and screen shots by going here on the Xobni website.

If you’d like to give Xobni a try for yourself, go to my original post and Jeff Bonforte, the CEO of Xobni, has offered invites to anyone that’s interested. I’m sure you won’t be sorry and you’ll be amazed that you’ve been as productive as you have been with Outlook without Xobni already installed.

Post from: EveryJoe

Possibly the Best 3rd Party Office App on the Planet – Xobni Review

If you didn’t know, and I didn’t until I read this post from Jason Powell, there’s a handy little tool that will read your auto-complete file and let you manage those addresses.

A couple minutes of Googling and I landed on a very small free app called NK2.info http://www.nk2.info/

NK2.info is a small utility to view and export the contents of an Outlook auto completion file.
• NK2.info can recover e-mail addresses and names from a corrupted NK2 file!
• Save money – NK2.info is donation based.
• Absolutely no spyware!

It’s a really nifty piece of software.  Run the single .exe file and click the browse button.  The app defaults to where your .NK2 file (it stores your auto complete data) should be located.  Click Open and you are presented with all your auto complete contacts.

Thank you Jason for this little tool. I’m sure plenty of people will appreciate and use it’s features.

Post from: EveryJoe

Outlook: Grab Addresses Out of Your Auto-Complete History