This is the best Outlook add-in so far from a company called Xobni located in San Francisco. “Xobni” is basically “Inbox” spelled backwards. The main idea behind the development of this plug-in was to give users an organized Inbox without them spending time on searching for conversations/emails, attachments and other relevant information. It creates profiles for each person that emails you and these profiles contain information like statistics of how many emails are being sent to and fro to that contact, what times are the most emails sent and received for that contact, social connections of the contact, conversations that are done with a particular contact in a nice threaded view and the attachments shared.

The system requirements to optimally run Xobni are a Windows XP (SP2 or greater) or Vista machine, Outlook 2003 or 2007, Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or above, a minimum of 1 GB RAM (most of the desktops have more than that today), a 2GHz of higher processor speed and a monitor with a resolution of 1024×768 (recommend a higher resolution if possible as the Xobni tool bar eats up some screen area of Outlook after installation).

It is also recommended that if the Outlook profile is connected with a Microsoft Exchange Server, then the profile be configured in a “Cached Exchange Mode”. This makes sense since this would create an OST file in the desktop and thus would help Xobni or even a normal Outlook user to gain access to emails in case of the non-availability of the Exchange Server.

Once installed, Xobni takes some time to scan and index the emails in your Outlook and starts ranking your contacts by the number of emails that are shared. It takes about a minute or two for the initial indexing. Much of the indexing is then later done by the plug-in in the background.

The statistics area displays useful information about the selected contact such as the number of emails sent and received, a bar graph showing what time of day most emails are exchanged and the rank which is determined by the number of emails exchanged between you and that contact.

The best part is the Actions area which helps to perform common interactions with the selected contact. For example, assume that there is no phone number stored in the contact information of a particular person. The request phone number action automatically creates a new email for that contact asking for the phone number. When a response is received from that person, Xobni automatically extracts the phone number and adds it to the profile.

Again in the Actions area are two great features – LinkedIn and Facebook tabs. Upon selecting a email from a contact, click on the LinkedIn or Facebook tabs and Xobni will pull out relevant information of that contact from LinkedIn or Facebook. Click on “view profile” and it directly opens up the selected contacts Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Again, the best part is that you can see the wall posts directly from Facebook in to this area.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The way Xobni displays the conversations using a threaded style similar to Google’s Gmail is amazing. All emails upon indexing are grouped in to conversations based on the subject, people in To and CC header fields, etc.

Each entry in the conversations panel will show the subject line of the email thread, a count of the emails the thread contains, as well as an approximate time that the last email in the conversation was sent. If the conversation contains an attached file, a small paper clip icon appears to the right of the subject line.

The title bar also totals the number of unique conversations. Clicking on the conversations bar expands the viewable area of conversations and gives you the option to filter the results. Clicking on any conversation entry consisting of more than one email will bring up a new sidebar frame showing the conversation thread.

The entry information will be shown at the top of the sidebar and the emails in the conversation are displayed just below that. If the email thread is longer than the sidebar can contain, there’s a detail slider, which can change the visible size of each email entry.

This way you can quickly find the right email that you’re looking for. If the conversation thread includes multiple people, they’re listed below in a panel called “People in Conversation”. Likewise, if there were any email attachments in that thread, these will be shown at the bottom of the sidebar in the “Files Exchanged” panel.

Each email entry in this view can be clicked on to further reveal the entire message. From here, you’re given the option to do standard email actions such as “Reply” and “Forward”. The “Open” button will open the original email from Outlook folders and the “View Conversation” button will take you back to the previous view of the entire conversation. Aside from the standard email header info, we can also see exactly where in the folder structure the email resides.

Xobni Analytics is another cool feature. This can be accessed from the menu bar of Outlook. Whether it’s the total volume of emails today, last week, entire year or the total volume of emails from your friend, analytics is the place to check all this out.

The data that’s displayed for the persons In and Out mail count, Rank, and Emails received graph are all powered behind the scenes by Analytics. One of the most widely used features within the Analytics window is the ability to determine own network rankings.

In short, Xobni is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that:

- Shows up previously hidden information about email interactions with people
- Allows to explore emails by contacts and conversations
- Performs lightning-fast searches
- Gives immediate access to files exchanged with contacts
- Allows to link Outlook and online social networks and data services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Hoover’s
- Indexes personal Yahoo! mail for integrated searching
- Provides an in-depth analysis of the overall flow of email traffic via Analytics

Go ahead and try out Xobni today. You won’t regret the decision. Xobni can be downloaded from http://www.xobni.com. If you manage to download and install it, do share your views here so that other visitors reading this post can read more about the user experiences from you.

First things first: FSMO means Flexible Single Master Operation and it is used within Active Directory to control, monitor and manage configuration updates. Without going in to more details about how FSMO works, let’s move on to understanding the Five (5) FSMO roles:

Schema Master: It controls all the updates and modifications that relate to schema of the Active Directory. It is the duty of the Schema Master to ensure that the latest schema has been replicated across all Domain Controllers in the directory. The role is forest-wide and there can be only one Schema Master in a forest.

Domain Naming Master: It controls the addition and deletion of domains in the forest. The role is once again forest-wide and there can be only one Domain Naming Master in a forest.

RID Master: Stands for Relative ID and is responsible for processing RID requests from all Domain Controllers in a particular domain. For example, if we create a user in Active Directory, a unique Security Identifier (SID) is created which identifies it in the domain. Along with this SID a Relative ID (RID) that is unique to the SID is also generated from a pool that is allocated. The main role of RID Master is to ensure that each DC has got enough RID pool and if not then process the request for the pool from the unallocated RID pool. The role is Domain specific and there can be only one Domain Controller handling this role.

Infrastructure Master: When an object in one domain is referenced by another object in another domain, it represents the reference by the GUID, the SID (for references to security principals), and the DN of the object being referenced. The infrastructure FSMO role holder is the DC responsible for updating an object’s SID and distinguished name in a cross-domain object reference. The role is Domain specific and there can be only one Domain Controller handling this role.

PDC Emulator: It seems to be a backward compatible role that has been handed over as a legacy from Windows NT 4.0 and is mainly used for syncing time in the Enterprise. The W32Time service that we see in the Services MMC has a very important role to play: synchronize time across the enterprise to that Kerberos Authentication works smoothly. After all, password changes, authentication, account lockout, etc. all depends on this. The role is Domain specific and there can be only one Domain Controller handling this role.

So why does an administrator need to know which Domain Controller is holding which role? Well, normally there is always a single machine that carries all the five FSMO roles, but there can be scenarios where an administrator would have moved one or more FSMO roles. To know why, read this KB article from Microsoft. With a better understanding of which server holds which role, the administrator can plan better for disaster recovery or scheduled maintenance. There are many ways to find out which DC holds which role, but here is one that uses NTDSUtil – a command line tool.

A word of caution before we proceed: If you do not know what you are doing and have no idea about how Active Directory works or even worse – what Active Directory is – please refrain from doing this practically. Doing this incorrectly or messing with this command can cause your Active Directory to crash and lose functionality.

Step #1: On any Domain Controller, click Start. In the Run command type CMD and hit Enter. You will be taken to the good old command prompt window (DOS were the days). Type ntdsutil and hit Enter.

Step #2: You shall see the screen with ntdsutil: prompt. Since we want to find out the roles, type roles and hit Enter. Notice that the prompt now changes to show fsmo maintenance:. Now is a good time to get more HELP on the list of available commands.

Step #3: On the fsmo maintenance: prompt, type ? and hit Enter. Right-click in the Window, mark and copy them. Paste the clipboard in to Notepad for easy reference.

Step #4: Type connection and press Enter. This will show a prompt with server connections:. Type connect to server <servername> (replace <servername with actual name> and press Enter.

Step #5: Once we are connected to the Domain Controller, type q to return back to the fsmo maintenance prompt. Now type, select operation target and then press Enter. Notice that the prompt changes to select operation target:.

Step #6: At the select operation target prompt, type list roles for connected server and press Enter. This would list all the FSMO roles for that Domain Controller. To get out of the ntdsutil, type q until you are back to the good old DOS prompt.

For those who are looking at ready solution rather than going through this process, check out DUMPFSMOS.CMD in the Resource Kit (Windows 2000/2003). This tool is a one-click utility that does the same trick.