The world as frankps sees it!
Search results for xobni
The public beta of Office 2010 is finally here
Nov 19th
I have had access to Microsoft Office 2010 through my TechNet subscription for 2-3 days now, and yesterday the technical preview of Office 2010 got released in a public beta. Anyone interested can now download it and take it for a spin. It’s available in seven languages – English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, French and German. The Office 2010 Mobile beta got released at more or less the same time, and can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
Office 2010 contains lots of improvements and new functionality, and Microsoft seems to have managed to redefine the game of office computing! Office 2010 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud services and is on it’s way to be connected to other cloud services. It’s funny to look back to pre-Internet times, when Microsoft Office was just four applications, with little integration between them and no use of the web for document authoring, collaboration and management. But when Microsoft bought Groove, perhaps the most important buy up Microsoft has done, things started changing.
Let us start with OneNote. In typical Microsoft style, they don’t succeed with their first and second attempt on creating new applications. So also with OneNote. In Office 2010 OneNote has finally gotten the attention it deserves. It is now part of the full Office suite, and not a separate purchase, and undergone many improvements. The biggest improvement is without doubt that OneNote has now become a collaboration platform with its new coauthoring feature. Have you ever liked doing project work on a wiki? Thought so, I’ve basically hated it myself. With coauthoring, a project team can share and collaborate on OneNote pages and notebooks. I started using OneNote frequently when I got introduced to Office 2007, and with Office 2010 I can definitely see myself making use of the coauthoring and collaboration tools for the research projects that I support.
A few words about Powerpoint 2010. I haven’t been able to play with it to much yet, but I see several news sites pointing out that the biggest news is that it enables you to edit video directly in the application, without the need for a third-party tool. I’m not a video person, even though I once in a while use iMovie on my Mac, but I can see that this will give videocasts of lectures a boost. I’m not sure that I would publish presentations online via SkyDrive, but I guess that SlideShare will come up with something here!
The first application that I tried after having installed the new office suite, was Outlook. Outlook has through the years gone from an email client to a conversation management tool. But to start with the e-mail first, Outlook 2010 comes with improved IMAP support. You can now also have your Trash folder on the IMAP server, but Drafts are still stored locally on the computer. I hope Microsoft improves the IMAP support even more before the finale release of 2010.
I mentioned Outlook as a conversation management tool. First of all, you can now see if the person you are about to write an e-mail to is online or not, and then rather then sending an e-mail start an IM conversation with the person. I started using Outlook, when I saw the great Xobni plugin (link to my blog entries about Xobni). And the biggest news in Outlook is the introduction of Outlook Social Connector (OSC), which appears to be a tool that ties into SharePoint 2010 and aggregates information on any user’s emails, phone conversations, and IM sessions with you. OSC will be your bridge in to into major social networks. Appearently LinkedIn is gonna be the first social network to be connected. This is a functionality that Lotus Notes has had for almost a year now.
Word seems to be feature complete these days, and no big news to report from this application. But I should mention the possibility to upload your documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive. SkyDrive is 25 GB with free online storage, and something you should really consider using. Do you have a good enough backup solution in place for your personal files?
Excel 2010. I rarly use spreadsheets in my work, but my guess is that Excel, as Word, is more or less feature complete and no bigger new functionality is introduced in 2010.
Windows 7 and Search (Advanced Query Syntax)
Oct 18th
With Windows 7 search has finally gotten better. It has actually gotten so good, that it gives me flashbacks to the time when I was running BeOS as my main operating system. I wrote BeOS here, cause all Microsoft has done here, is catching up with what other operating systems have done for years. MacOS X has similar functionality with it’s Spotlight. In fact, the initial version of Spotlight was made by Dominic Giampaolo, who wrote the file system for BeOS.
Advanced Query Syntax
Microsoft calls it’s solution Advanced Query Syntax (AQS). Fear not, cause it is not difficult to use at all. AQS lets you quickly define and narrow your searches for even more targeted results. Do be able to do so, AQS make use of metadata. Metadata is data about the file and it’s content. If you have done some simple web publishing from time to time, you have probably had you sysadmin reminding you to not to forget filling out the metadata. The Internet search engines make use of the metadata, and Windows Search will do it in pretty much the same way.
With Windows 7 I guess we can say that Windows Search is now totally integrated with the OS. If you are still using Windows Vista (or XP), Windows Search can be downloaded and installed.
Where is my Word document?
It’s becoming more and more of a problem. Many of use have been using computers for years, and we have now gotten ourselves both internal and external harddisks in TB sizes. And as we never throw things away, the harddisks are pretty full as well, with tons of pictures, music, videos, emails and documents.
How many of us haven’t been thinking (or screamed out loud), now where did I put that file? I wrote that document a month ago! With Office 2007 we got a new Save file panel.
Are you using Office 2007? Good, and have you ever taken the time to add tags to the document before saving it? Shame on you! To be able to use AQS successfully, you will have to take the time to add metadata your documents. I know for myself, that I have not taken the time to do so on all of my documents, but I can promise you that, that after I started learning about the powers of AQS, I have become a lot better in adding metadata!
Now go to the Seach field in the Start menu and do a search on aqs, and within a split of a second you will see the results. It found the document(s) based on the tag(s) you have added to it. The precise AQS term for this search is tags:[aqs].
Finding Music with AQS
Explaining this metadata and AQS can be done a lot simpler with music files. Have you ever ripped a CD? Oh, you’ve rip several. Have you ever ripped a CD without Internet connection? And last question, have you bought music on iTunes Music Store (iTMS)?
When you hare ripping a CD, you are first of all compressing wav files to MP3, but you are also connecting to an Internet Service that provides you with metadata for the album you are ripping. If you buy MP3s online, the music store will already have tagged the music that you are downloading. In general we can say that these files are rich on metadata.
The metadata container most commonly used in conjunction with audio files is ID3. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.
You see from the screenshots that the search for the artists amiina brings up the same songs. The search syntax is artists:amiina, in this case I could have done album:”Kurr” and come up with the same songs. If I only wanted to listen to the song Boga, I would have used the syntax title:”Boga” (or since it’s just one word title:Boga). A search on Genre in this case would not have worked, the syntax for that is genre:electronica.
Find pictures when you want them
Similar to music there excists a standard metadata container for pictures, called EXIF. But there is a big difference. A lot of the metadata is automatically added by the camera as you take the pictures, but the metadata you would use for search is not among them. These data you will in most cases have to add yourself manually.
Microsoft provides an excellent application for keeping track of your photos, Windows Live Photo Gallery. I am using it almost every day. This application devides the metadata in to two categories: Information (Date taken, Camera, Exposure, Aperture, Focal length, ISO) and Descriptive tags. Adding descriptive tags is what will make it easier for you to find back to the picture when you need it or want to show it to others. For this night photo, I added three tags: E6 (the name of the highway), Helsfyr (name of the place) and nightphoto. Through the years I can have taken lots of photos, so the tag Helsfyr alone could be useless. But what if I used combinations of tags? Using tags:[Helsfyr AND nightphoto] or tags:[Helsfyr AND E6] would most likely exclude a lot of photos.
Finding e-mails on the fly!
Outlook’s inbuilt search is painfully slow, so I often use Xobni or Windows Search to look for e-mails. Some search syntaxes you should learn at once are: to:”frankps@domain.com”, to:”Frank Paul Silye”, from:”frankps@domain.com” and from:”Frank Paul Silye”. The search result will also list attachments.
Some finale words
I hope this introduction to Advanced Query Syntax gets you started. You can read a lot more about it on Microsoft’s Windows Search pages, available syntaxes can be found under Technical Resources. I have not covered searches with operators (<, >, <=, >=, ..) and wildcards (?, *), and not much about searches with multiple criteria (AND, OR, NOT).
Xobni with Twitter support
Sep 30th
As you might have noticed, my favourite plugin for Outlook is Xobni. It is actually the reason why I migrated from Thunderbird to Outlook, and why I for now don’t want to go back to Thunderbird.
Today I updated Xobni to v1.8, which gives me Twitter support in Outlook. Great functionality, I can know have a quick look on what people who are sending me e-mails are Twittering about and can reply them directly on Twitter if the topic is the same! You can actually reply, retweet, follow, view that contact’s Twitter profile, or even post a new tweet.
The new version fixes several reported bugs, and more important the incredible search speed increased dramatically again. Xobni is now also fully compatible with the upcoming Windows 7.
I must admit, it is very tempting to pay the US $ 29.95 and get access to Xobni Plus.
My favourite Outlook extension Xobni, available in a Plus version
Jul 15th
Xobni Plus users get these exclusive benefits:
- An advanced search query builder
- The ability to search within conversations and networks
- Support for phrases and Boolean queries
- Xobni Rank-powered AutoSuggest
- Advanced conversation and network filtering
- As well as a premium technical support for one year
Should I pay the 30 dollars to get the extra functionality?
Xobni no longer in beta!
Mar 25th
My favourite Outlook-plugin, and the very reason that I dropped Thunderbird in favour of Outlook, Xobni, is now out of beta. The plugin adds social networking and search features to the email and contact organizer. I first looked at Xobni last year. Today Xobni is dropping the beta tab with the release of Xobni 1.7. Xobni’s webpage has also gotten an overhaul.
The new version doesn’t come with any shiny new features, but it it does have a number of improvements under the hood that let Xobni and Outlook work better together. For instance, Xobni loads faster, loads messages better due to caching, and users can control how often and how much of their email is indexed by the plugin. You can also decide whether Xobni will open every time you launch Outlook or if you want it to appear only when you want it.
I ran in to several problems trying to upgrade an existing version on my work computer. I guess the problems were related to me just quiting Outlook, and that I also had to end it’s background process. After ending the process, installation went smooth.
Xobni continues to be available as a free download, but the company is working on a premium version that will be available this summer.






Recent Comments