Webware

The new contact manager pops up when you hit the "to" field in Gmail

(Credit: Google)

Gmail has long had a feature that automatically suggests and fills out the name of people you've corresponded with. On Tuesday night, the service got a tweak that makes that process easier--it's also likely to be second-nature to Microsoft Outlook users.

Now clicking on the link next to the "to" field pulls up Gmail's contact list manager, where you're able to very quickly sort through your contacts, or anyone you've e-mailed, and pick the ones you want to include in the message. The same goes for removing anyone; you just have to click on their name again and they get removed.

Not readily available when using this new menu is a way to select which of these users you want to add as CC's or BCC's. Outlook does this in the same menu, whereas in Gmail, you have to open up each of those fields in the message, then click to open up the contact manager yet again. Hopefully future versions streamline this process and combine those options into the same UI.

This may seem like a very small feature, but for heavy Gmail users it removes the need to create special lists of contacts they e-mail on a regular basis. Instead, it makes use of regular e-mailing habits and more deeply integrates the short list of people you're communicating with--the same one that's found in Google's contacts manager.

A few months ago, CNET Editor Rafe Needleman lauded Xobni, an e-mail search plug-in for Outlook, but wondered where the money would come from to keep the company afloat. On Tuesday night, Xobni responded with a version update, Xobni 1.8, and the introduction of a new premium service, Xobni Plus.

The free version of Xobni 1.8 features a slightly revamped interface that loads faster thanks to a switch from a slightly draggy custom UI (built using C#) to HTML rendering. More important to most users, Xobni's sidebar has gotten richer on the whole, searching the subjects of e-mail attachments in addition to contacts and messages, and stuffing more details into the pop-up box you see after hovering over an item. Xobni now also displays thumbnails of Facebook images in the search results in addition to the profile screen--but you'll only see these for contacts who have enabled third-party extensions in their privacy settings.

You also can't fail to notice that a new Google search bar at the bottom of the sidebar replicates the contents you type into Xobni's search. If you launch Google's search, Xobni will open the results in a new browser tab. You can hide the feature in Options to reclaim more screen space.

Microsoft Outlook, by Xobni Plus--screenshots

These new features, while nifty additions for regular Xobni users, are dwarfed by those introduced in Xobni Plus. The one-time fee of $29.95 for one computer (and $9.95 for each additional) gets you search access to appointments and your Outlook task list. It also opens up the search bar to let you search phrases in quotes or type in Boolean search terms. A new Advanced button flanking the search bar lets Plus users build granular searches for contacts and messages, including flagging e-mails with attachments. This Advanced button is also visible in the free version as a marketing tool, but won't be operational.

Searching the full text in a conversation is another useful, often-requested feature that takes life in Xobni Plus. (The free version will let you see conversations and filter e-mails by subject, but does not provide a filter for full-text search.) Another filter helps you wade through bulky e-mail threads by stripping out all but the direct messages. Then there's this subtle, but terrific, help: Xobni Plus adds its index of incoming and outgoing e-mail addresses to the To field of every message you compose. Even if Outlook hasn't captured the sender's info, you'll be able to quickly e-mail them without hunting through your in-box for their address.

Advanced search and the thumbnail search result are two additions to Xobni Plus.

(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)

Xobni continues to handily and speedily find messages and contacts. Searches still aren't instantaneous, especially if you're working from a bloated in-box, but they're zippier than Outlook's default. Our greatest complaint is that Outlook's program window must be enlarged for you to see many of these new features. Since the profile window in Xobni's sidebar doesn't give you a scroll bar, people who work with Outlook condensed into a small window may miss the extra features until they expand the application interface.

Xobni 1.8 is free for use, but will have some features, like Advanced Search, disabled. You can use Xobni Plus free for 14 days. Get started by activating Xobni Plus from the sidebar (you can't miss the prompts) and scrolling to the bottom of the sign-up page.

I have thousands of e-mail messages in my corporate Outlook in-box, and thousands more in Gmail and in my ancient Hotmail account. MailStore Home is a free program that can archive them all locally, and display those archives in an interface that reads like your Outlook in-box.

Why use it? You can clear away old messages and attachments, but easily search to find them again when that inevitable moment arrives. Until universal offline in-boxes like Yahoo's Zimbra Desktop start addressing consumers on a wider scale, MailStore Home is also a good way to read mail offline in areas of spotty Wi-Fi, or to use as a de facto message backup.

MailStore Home's search pane includes attachments and repeat queries.

(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)

MailStore Home can archive a pretty impressive list of accounts and protocols, including Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, IMAP, POP3. It also supports .EML files. It largely resembles Microsoft Outlook's layout with a side bar on the left--complete with folder tree and search field--and a large reading pane on the right. There are also some small navigational icons along the top that you can use to jump to archiving, burning archives to disk, advanced search, and tools.

The program's management is straightforward. Buttons on the start screen replicate the navigational icons up top, and there are also some stats, like your oldest and newest messages and the total size of your archive. When you archive an in-box, a wizard walks you through special configuration steps and lets you enter folders to archive or exclude if you want some backed up, but not all. MailStore Home skips your spam, trash, and junk folders by default, and it checks for duplicate messages while going about its business.

E-mail search is one feature of note. Using the advanced search screen, you can drill down to specifics--dates, folders, even the contents of e-mail attachments. You can also search for messages with or without attachments, and save queries to rerun the report at a later time. MailStore Home supports Boolean search terms. When you've found your message, you'll have management options like opening, saving, and exporting. Search was speedy and accurate in our tests. Though processing took a few long seconds, we were able to reply to archived Gmail messages via Outlook.

The freeware version for consumers doesn't do it all. There's no auto-archiving or scheduling for starters, so archiving is a manual activity. Initial scanning also takes a long time, and subsequent archives of the same in-box (click "run" to rearchive) start over from scratch instead of offering you the option to pick up from the most recent message date. We'd like to see more, and more nimble, filters on that left sidebar, like to filter only e-mails with attachments. MailStore Home also restricts you to three account profiles, which isn't especially useful if you've got more active accounts than that. Despite these drawbacks, MailStore Home offers a fine free solution for storing e-mail from multiple in-boxes and searching through the archives.

Related story: Three killer Outlook add-ons for office workers

Google App Sync for Outlook users can now search their Outlook folders using Windows Desktop Search.

(Credit: Microsoft)

It's once again safe to fire up Windows Desktop Search if you're a Google Apps user.

Google's App Sync for Outlook allows fans of Outlook to keep the familiar interface even if their company switches to Google Apps on the back end, but it debuted with a flaw: Windows Desktop Search couldn't find e-mails created with the new software installed. Google got together with Microsoft to work on a solution to the problem--which must have made for a few interesting meetings--and a fix has been released, Google announced Tuesday.

There are a few other outstanding bugs, such as the lack of support for the Adobe's Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar, but Google made it a priority to fix the bugs that were impeding normal use of e-mail first, a representative said. Along with the restoration of Windows Desktop Search, Google also made it possible to turn autoarchiving on or off during installation and improved synchronization of the little notes attached to contact records.

Those who are currently using App Sync for Outlook will have the updates automatically applied to their software, and a new version can also be downloaded directly from Google.

Google is working on an update to its Google App Sync software, the latest version of which breaks Microsoft's Windows Desktop Search along with several plug-ins found in Outlook.

A post by Google on its enterprise blog late Tuesday details some of the broken plug-ins, which include Adobe's Acrobat PDF Maker toolbar, as well as Microsoft's Office Outlook Connector and Outlook change notifier. As a fix, Google is recommending that users with Google App Sync installed, and who need to use these tools and plug-ins simply uninstall the program until a fix can be made.

While the plug-ins may not be as important to some users, the crux of the problem is that Google's add-on disables Windows Desktop Search, and some other third-party search tools. It's not doing this maliciously though; Google says it does it to keep them from endlessly attempting to index the sync files the special software creates. Getting those programs to stop doing that will take cooperation from the companies that make them (including Microsoft), which Google says it's working on.

Google introduced its App Sync software earlier this month as an optional tool to its Premier and Education Edition users. It lets them sync up messages, calendar appointments, and contacts between Outlook and Google's hosted office services.

Corrected at 4 p.m. PDT: This story initially gave the incorrect day for the Google enterprise blog post. It was Tuesday.

Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps--and away from Microsoft's Exchange e-mail software--without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.

Google's Dave Girouard discusses how Google is making a play for more and more business customers for Google Apps.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News)

Microsoft's Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google's new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren't ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google's version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition--as well as Education Edition customers--will be able to roll out this plug-in across their networks and allow Outlook messages, contacts, and calendar appointments to sync with Google Apps.

Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world's corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies. Quoting data from Forrester, Google's David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google's hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.

However, there apparently is a sizable enough number of workers that refuse to move off Outlook, meaning that IT directors who want to sign up with Google were forced to maintain a Microsoft Exchange server to placate those folks while moving everybody else to Gmail. An alternative where Outlook users are connected to Gmail through IMAP got the job done, but at the expense of a severe performance hit, said Chris Vander Mey, a senior product manager with Google.

Now, they can let those people continue to use Outlook but allow IT managers to move completely away from Exchange servers. "We've made it pretty easy to exchange your Exchange server for Google," Girouard said.

Google's eye is squarely on Microsoft's cozy position in the enterprise when it comes to products such as Google Apps. Around 1.75 million businesses are using Google Apps, Girouard said, although he declined to clarify how many of those businesses are Premier Edition customers.

CIOs invited by Google to a press event in San Francisco were naturally bullish on Google's version of cloud computing, and downplayed any concerns about security, reliability or the loss of a competitive advantage when it comes to giving up control of their IT.

"At most businesses, IT is not core. I'm not in the IT business to make money, I'm here to enable (my company) to win," said Bob Rudy, vice president and CIO for semiconductor designer Avago Technologies in San Jose.

The plug-in only works for Outlook users on Windows; Mac users on Entourage will have to wait.

Improving Outlook is no easy feat given that it's notoriously anti-social when it comes to social networking. The free Outlook plug-in iLook Social and Outlook tries to make Microsoft's ubiquitous e-mail client a bit more sociable by including souped-up searching and filtering, Skype integration, e-mail controls, content and attachment exporting, and Facebook support.

Highlighted in red, the iLook Social and Outlook plug-in gives Outlook users more networking features.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

For a sidebar pane, it's a good list of features with an interface that integrates smoothly into Outlook 2007. Desktop e-mail clients are going to have to adapt to social networking far better than they have to survive, especially if the future of e-mail is Google Wave. Postbox does a decent job of remixing Thunderbird for social networking, but it's still in beta and lacks the calendaring you can get in Thunderbird using the Lightning plug-in. While iLook's features are worthwhile, their execution leaves plenty of room for improvement.

The search and Skype features are the strongest, but could still be better. Boolean searches are not supported, nor are cross-folder queries, and the nature of Outlook requires you to manually create a new search results folder that iLook doesn't address. Basically, that means you've got to figure out where your search results are going to go before you see what they are--it's counter-intuitive.

The Skype support is strong, with decent chat quality, contact list support, and other Skype features. Like any third-party Skype plug-in, though, it requires Skype to be running, and iLook wouldn't load if Skype was running before Outlook loaded. The Facebook support was far less convenient than it should've been to convince users to utilize it in iLook. Attachment exporting worked well, but that was more of an alternate path up the mountain than introducing a whole new geography to Outlook.

Making use of the entire iLook experience, unfortunately, will put you in for a bumpy ride. Although Outlook itself isn't known for its speed, this plug-in definitely slows it down. Switching between its features often causes error messages, and it's hard to tell if or how those errors affect either iLook or Outlook. The features that iLook Social and Outlook provides are smart choices, but the end experience is buggy and needs to be tightened before it can be considered for daily use.

After making a splash helping Windows users quickly search for conversations and contacts in their endless Outlook in-boxes with Xobni, the e-mail organizer company shared its plan on Monday to make the same service available for BlackBerry.

Xobni wouldn't elaborate on any program details, like how exactly it will look and work on the BlackBerry, but they did say that it will involve integration with the phone's address book.

"The app will be focused on contact and relationship management and bring a lot of the relationship features people like from Xobni in Outlook to the BlackBerry," added Xobni's co-founder, Matt Brezina.

If I were to take a stab at what's in store, I'd guess that Xobni's BlackBerry debut will include the Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, and statistics information found in Xobni for Windows. The emphasis on relationship management rather than e-mail organization and search hints that shortcutting to e-mail messages from your BlackBerry contact list isn't an immediate part of Xobni's mobile plan--but we just don't know.

What we do know is that Xobni's BlackBerry version is expected to be available sometime in the summer. It won't be tied to corporate policies, and the download will be available through BlackBerry App World. It's not yet clear if the app will be compatible with phones whose operating systems predate version 4.2 of the BlackBerry device software.

Until more details trickle out, you can sign up in advance here.

How many competing streams of information do you need to keep track of?

I monitor three e-mail accounts, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook to keep current with life and work. Those are my streams of continuous personal input, separate from the items that we all handle on an interrupt basis: phone calls, Skype, IMs, and people dropping by.

I don't think I'm unique in feeling overwhelmed. There's a ton of information we're all getting in real time today, and we need modern ways to process it.

Some of the services responsible for generating floods of personal information are also innovating in giving users ways to deal with it. Facebook, for example, redesigned its default view to present a stream of information that users could throttle by the judicious use of new filters. A lot of people didn't like it, but Facebook was on to something: the future of dealing with personal incoming information streams is real-time filtering.

OutlookDeck gives you TweetDeck-like features for your e-mail stream.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

This is the new way to handle otherwise overwhelming incoming streams: Set up smart filters, park a window showing them somewhere on your desktop, and watch them out of the corner of your eye. It's the continuous partial-attention concept that has been talked about for a while, and with the right software tools and sufficient monitor real estate, it is not nearly as distracting as you might think.

If you're a pilot or a particularly attentive driver, you'll see this as similar to situation awareness, the pervasive perception of all the parts of your environment and your orientation to them.

One of the reasons I like TweetDeck (and several of its competitors) so much is that it makes social-network awareness easy. You can set up a console that shows you different columns for search results on multiple different queries, all at once. As your moods or needs change, you can turn on and off your queries.

For example, I run a "Webware 100" query when we're running the awards program; when I'm in the middle of covering a conference or tracking a hot news story, I set up queries for those items. I turn them off when the events wind down.

There's an old product category that desperately needs dashboard filters: e-mail. Sure, you can search in almost any e-mail product, and you can even save your searches so you can pop into them for quick peeks. Some e-mail clients, like Outlook, can also pop up alerts on screen when you get certain messages.

Neither of these solutions is quite right. What the heavy e-mail user needs is a way to quietly monitor incoming mail with desktop filters. And that's what the early-stage software experiment OutlookDeck does. Used correctly, it's a valuable productivity booster.

OutlookDeck looks like TweetDeck. It shows you multiple filtered columns of incoming items pulled from your Outlook e-mail app. It cannot replace the e-mail client itself, but it's a good tool to monitor your in-box for things important for you. For example, if you want to see all the messages about a project you're working on, or all mentions of a competitor, you can set up filters for those. (You can also use it to display your unfiltered in-box, but it's redundant for that purpose.)

The product was created by David Ing, who's been working on tools to improve e-mail since before this experiment. He previously wrote Taglocity, a system for reducing e-mail clutter in work groups by applying tags and filters to multiparty conversations.

OutlookDeck is very useful, even though its filters are coarse--you can't create complex queries, for example. And you can't save queries for later. It also does a poor job displaying text from e-mails that have HTML coding in them. But this small app does show how the constant social dialogue that people are getting accustomed to with Twitter, and Facebook, and FriendFeed is making its way into the hoary old communications medium of e-mail.

I like it. We are being barraged by streams of information, but with the right tools, it is possible to find a balance between getting too much information that takes too much of your attention, and not getting enough, which puts you out of touch in your own social airspace.