We just launched KiGoo, a free tool that allows Google users to fully manage (create, read, update and delete) their Calendar and Contacts from MS Outlook.

Also KiGoo manage the Free Busy information of your Gmail contacts for appointments if they shared their FB status.

Currently we support Windows XP and office 2007.

(link)

What companies need is not a funny “outlook in outlook” but a tool to help them in every days work.
Other tools understand that perfectly:
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I loved Xobni and would love to keep using it, however I switched to Gmail after years of outlook due to bloated software and limited resources on my PC.

The only thing I miss about outlook right now is xobni and all these folks here talking about how it missed the market and is not a success because of colors? What a joke! Some of you seem to even note that you are marketing consultants? This is the exact type myopic perspective that have caused email in general to fall into a place of discomfort.

Colors do not make or break an app when its clearly in BETA form… all xobni would have to do is ad some level of a color picker and your so-called “marketing failure” is over. Commenting on what is a good or bad design idea is perfectly acceptable, but assuming it to be a failure due to such a small fix is foolish and shortsighted.

As far as those people who complained that Xobni offers absolutely 0 help in outlook, have you gone mad? Outlook needs something like this.. with 150,000 emails stored in my outlook searching and organizing conversations and files through outlook’s native search function is next to useless.

Bottom line here is that when a person like Bill Gates looks at a product and says it is a good one.. it probably is.

..minus of course vista :)
(just kidding)
(ok not really)

I agree with Bill Gates and everyone else that has a smidge of vision here and encourage Xobni to continue this direction. I believe in this product and want to see more in the way of development for outlook and also future projects toward gmail and possibly firefox addons.

-Chris
A MARKETING CONSULTANT!

Thanks for all the comments, even for those people that had a negative experience with Xobni. You guys have helped us improve the product every single day since we started working on it, and we’re continuing to improve it, add new features, and rid it of bugs.

One misunderstanding comes from the title of the article. My original title was “Xobni’s Journey to Building the Right Product” and it was meant to illustrate how we realized and corrected our mistakes. The title got changed to a phrasing that implied that we built a killer app, and are done with it. Xobni is very useful for people who deal with a large amount of email and want fast search and people-based navigation. It’s not for everyone, and we’re still improving it.

it wasted the screen space and tells me nothing useful. I dont need to know who I emailed most… the more i email to, doesn’t mean I care.

Really I did not get what value Xobni was bring on. The Search is marginally better than outlook. Email categorization per person was actually not useful! in an office lot of people discuss about a single subject, I think grouping emails based on the subject would have been a better choice. Meeting invitation is actually silly. Also it would be great to be able to right click on a contact and invite him to chat - with any messenger.

A product won’t sell if it requires to create a new login/id. People
don’t have patience to create new id always.
I think a firefox extension would be much better.