Xobni comes out of Beta to rock Microsoft Outlook's world

Contact management tool Xobni has been officially released yesterday after nearly seven months of Invite-only beta and could be a life-saving tool for users who depend on Outlook to communicate with the rest of the world.

Xobni, which is currently available for free on their website, indexes emails in Outlook and make them readily available and searchable for future use.

While other desktop searching clients like Microsoft Desktop Search and Copernic already offer email searching functionalities, Xobni goes further and adds a few more extras.

For example, it can pull phone numbers automatically and create entries for name, it can also thread messages which allows you to follow conversations and provide with precious statistics on the way you communicate with your colleagues and partners.

Bill Gates is known to be using it as a productivity tool and has recently demoed it as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose.

A few days ago, Xobni rejected plans to get acquired by Microsoft two weeks after it said it would accept $20 million from the Redmond-based software company.

Xobni already has plans to release a corporate version later this year and is rumoured to be working on web-client based plugins for Yahoo mail and possibly Gmail as well. Tags: Business Apps