Today it was announced that Xobni has released for the general public to download.  Xobni is the best Outlook plug-in that I’ve seen in a long time.  This sidebar allows for fast and easy email search, attachment aggregation, and thread compression.  Another handy feature of the tool includes extracting contact information from email signatures – this is extremely handy for quickly finding contact info for folks that don’t yet exist in your contacts list.  There is also a host of bells an whistles thrown in around inbox analytics (who you send mail to, who you receive it from, etc) and fun ways to drill through your network of email contacts.