So, I’m really just getting into the spirit of using add-ins with Outlook. An interesting feature of my life is the fact that my email contacts and my real-life contacts don’t have a huge overlap. I’m somewhat introverted so plugins that tout a huge bunch of social networking features don’t go over too well with me. Nevertheless, I’m currently giving two add-ins I’ve heard much about: Plaxo and Xobni.
1) Plaxo: I’m primarily using this to back-up my Outlook contacts (copied from my Windows Mobile Treo 750 smartphone). One of my nightmares is to have all my phone contacts magically disappear and I’ll have to start adding them from scratch. As of now, I’ve got over 270 contacts and about 10% are really people I talk with. The rest are numbers to services I use like my Bank, et cetera. I’m a little leery of Plaxo because they’ve got a reputation for being a little too trigger-happy with your contact list. However, I made sure to uncheck/check the relevant check-boxes i.e. “do you want to search your Yahoo/MSN/Aol/Lycos/whatever email address book for Plaxo contacts?”, et cetera.
2) Xobni: this one, I’m really interested in because it indexes my Yahoo mail! It also brings some interesting analytics to my usage of Outlook & emails sent and received. I’m rather uninformed about these two tools to talk about them, but I intend on using them for at least 1 month and give a more detailed answer about whether or not they are here to stay (on my PC, that is). 🙂