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.