Xobni - www.xobni.com have today launched the Enterprise edition of their family of Outlook plug-in products designed to make you more efficient in the way in which you interact with one of the biggest untapped corporate data resources – your inbox!

As a free outlook add-in (along with the $30 Xobni Plus edition with its enhanced features and performance) Xobni has been downloaded by over 3 Million users. It’s snowballing popularity is highlighted by Bill Gates’ decision to use Xobni as a demonstration of the power of Outlook (and Office) as a developer platform.

So what’s it all about?

Xobni is about ‘taking back your inbox’. Since installing it some three months ago, I’m not sure I could live without it anymore. I won’t go into detail on the out of the box features as they’re well covered in detail here: http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/

What you see with Xobni in Outlook:

Where Xobni gets really interesting from a Business Intelligence & Performance Management perspective is with today’s launch of Xobni Enterprise.

Xobni Enterprise delivers what users love about Xobni, whilst meeting corporate IT needs – primarily ease of management through centralised deployment and configuration; tighter control over which extensions are available and to whom (e.g. call centre users don’t get Twitter or Facebook access, but sales guys do get LinkedIn for example) and, and this is the biggy, the ability to create and deploy custom extensions.

So what’s that got to do with BI?

BI means many things to many people, but here at Altius we believe Businss Intelligence is about turning the reams of data within an organisation into decision-quality information that enables better decision making. When you think about it, where does most of the information you make decisions on live? Where do you go to confirm the prices agreed on a contract? Where do you look to find the white paper or product catalogue before making a purchase? The likely answer is your inbox (or one of it’s hundreds of sub-folders, calendar invites and contact cards).

Given the unstructured nature of the inbox, it’s often difficult to find what you’re looking for and easy to get distracted, wasting millions of corporate hours and costing businesses an estimated $900 Billion each year in the US alone.  Xobni helps to bring order the chaos of the inbox and now, with Xobni Enterprise, we can help deliver information from corporate data systems in the same way. Xobni Enterprise enables us to extend the delivery of right time, right place information by connecting information from portal, CRM and back-office systems right into the user’s Outlook window in the context of their current conversations. By providing a context-sensitive Xobni Enterprise window into corporate systems such as SharePoint, Oracle, SAP and line-of-business applications we can support end-users’ abilities to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

The custom extensions library already comes equipped with SharePoint and SalesForce.com connectors allowing you to quickly pull additional data from those corporate silos into Outlook and position it inline with the conversation you’re having – right time, right place.

In addition to the ‘out of the box’ extensions, we as a Xobni Partner, can help you create custom extensions through the Xobni Enterprise APIs to deliver any other information you require, queried based upon the context of the e-mail the user has selected.

Custom Extensions in action

One example integration is the delivery of Bing Maps for Enterprise (formerly Virtual Earth) as a Xobni Enterprise extension. When linked to our geographical data reporting solutions (e.g. sales data for the currently selected sales rep, or location based information as part of an asset tracking application), this could quickly allow sales managers or call centre reps to gain insight into the performance or location of the person they are in conversation with.

In the screenshot below for example, we utilise the e-mail address of the current contact, query a reporting solution and deliver a customised Bing Maps for Enterprise rendering directly into Xobni, centered on the contact’s location. This could easily be overlaid with additional data – for example selecting a territory manager might deliver sales performance data for that manager across the region, rendered over the map. At a glance, the sales director is then able to put conversations with the manager into the frame of current performance.

Find out more

Xobni Enterprise is hot off the press, launched only this morning at San Francisco’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. Over the coming weeks, we’re talking to dozens of IT Managers, Business users and Enterprise Architects to understand how Xobni can work for them. If you’d like to find out more, see a demo of the functionality OR if you are already loving Xobni and want to discuss a custom extension for your business or place a Xobni Enterprise order – get in touch – matt.quinn@altiusconsulting.com

Press Release: http://www.xobni.com/press/11012009_enterprise.php
Xobni Enterprise Product: http://www.xobni.com/enterprise