I always look forward to the new Microsoft Office releases; I look for those cool new features that will make my work life easier or my presentations cooler.  Wow ok I guess I am a bit of a nerd but I also look forward to football season and UFC fights as well!

Debra Shinder did an article for Techrepublic, I assume she was one of the privileged few with access to the alpha testing of Office 2010 and she has some screen captures and a list of her top 10 favorite new features.  Make sure you check out the deleting conversations in Outlook and the linking to documents in OneNote.  I always thought OneNote was a joke and not very useful but lately I have found some really good applications for the tool and I’m really looking forward to it seeing some love from Microsoft for OneNote in 2010. http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=900&tag=nl.e103

So in keeping with our review of Microsoft Outlook Plug-In solutions we decided to setup a little experiment to compare one of the brightest stars in the industry Xobni and another product we had looked at once before Lookeen.  The heart of both products is Outlook productivity through Search.  So we setup 3 test sets where we had emails, attachments, contacts, appointments, and tasks.  We did not try multiple .pst files maybe we will try that experiment at a later date.  The results were interesting, but not surprising both products index your email folders keeping track of what you receive and send so expectations were that both would perform equally well.  Both products presented basically the same information and the speed was almost identical, so this required us to look at more subjective matters such as aesthetics and personal opinions.  We stayed away from price but the two products are only separated by about $10.

Xobni - Their integrated model with Outlook and fashionable user interface won them a lot of points among the staff here.  They had nice features such as analytics and well organized information window that quickly displayed contact information, conversations, and files exchanged.  On the downside they did miss one email in our tests that Lookeen caught and the integration does take up a bit of room in an already busy Outlook window.

Lookeen - The product seems to find the emails, appointments, and tasks as fast as Xobni and the results are displayed in a separate window that can easily be displayed alongside Outlook or on a second monitor(even better).  This product is not as pretty as Xobni and it is missing some nice features most notably the analytics but if you are just looking for search capability it is a good product.

At the end of the day we have mixed reviews internally but the majority of people are using Xobni free version currently with a few looking to upgrade to pro.  Lookeen hasn’t disappeared but with pricing being similar most people went with Xobni at least for now.

As a non-programmer but with years spent working with teams designing and developing software products across several industries it always amazes me at how people look at the outward appearance of software differently.  The graphical user interface (GUI) is always a point of interesting conflict and would probably rival most United Nations meetings on how much people disagree about the look, feel, and functionality.

We are working on a new integration into Microsoft Outlook and had a design meeting today where we sat around and discussed how the solution should look and feel.  When we came to the part on user interface, more specifically, the outward facing portion there was quite a few points of debate.  The two primary points were that software integrations should be completely embedded and only really visible at the point they are required.  The other is that there are certain levels of customer expectations to have the availability to features like toolbars in Windows products after the installation.

So, should software integration for a Microsoft office product, be completely embedded and basically hidden until the point the user requires that functionality?  Or should the software be a bit more obtrusive and sort of hang around in the toolbar all the time so that you know where to go and get it when you’re ready? 

Explanations from both groups:

Software hidden – If software is designed properly then there is no need for an obtrusive toolbar.  Especially when integrating into another product it should just work when required and only be visible when necessary.  A toolbar should only be necessary if that is the best way for the user to access the functionality.

Software visible – When people install a new piece of software there are expectations that the software is out and visible upon installation.  Yes over time as people become more comfortable with the application they may choose to hide or remove certain functionality like a toolbar.  But for marketing and customer expectations software should be as visible as possible during the initial installation.

What do you think?

Advertised as a search tool add-in for Microsoft Outlook, Lookeen is suppose to make finding emails, conversations, and attachments that reside within Outlook faster and easier.  So I decided to give the 14 day demo a try.

So how does it fair against the existing Microsoft Outlook 2007 search? Lookeen did a great job of finding every email, appointment, and attachment with the related search terms I tested.  Outlook was able to find the same files but not the appointments, but basically at the same speed.  Lookeen separated out the appointments, emails, and attachments into separate tabs while Outlook can only manage them in one view.  Outlook does however highlight the text in the email that matched my search term which allowed me to quickly identify if that item was of interest to me or not.  Lookeen also had a few other nice features to mention:

·         You can search for activities over the past day, week, or month and Lookeen will sort those into appropriate categories.  It was even able to pull up tasks and Microsoft Live messages I sent to colleagues during the search period.  However the messages were in a .xml file format that took a bit of time to parse. 

·         You can search conversations with a sender or contact by clicking on an email from that person or their contact information in your contacts list.  This was helpful when I tried finding some email conversations with a customer that I knew were only a week or two old.

·         It has a find similar “stuff” function that looks for email content that is similar to the highlighted email.  It appears to pull similarity from words in the subject line and not the content body, but still a reasonably quick and useful tool.

Overall like most Microsoft Outlook Add-in application the majority of the solution is mirrored from functionality already in Outlook that may not be as user friendly, quick to access or aesthetic as we would like. But the search by contact function and the ability to sort out items in the Lookeen result window were very helpful and made reviewing the information easy.  From what I can tell after a few days of playing with it Lookeen seems to be a pretty good addition to my life inside of Outlook and worth a try for anyone who hasn’t yet figured out how to manage those hundreds of emails you get and send every day.