Review: Xobni Public Beta

This morning Xobni was announced public beta state. I did not know what Xobni was, so I watched the introduction video (below). Right after watching the video I installed the add-on on my computer.

Xobni is a social community add-on for Microsoft Outlook, that indexes your email and adds usefull information to your contacts.

Some information that Xobni provides:

• The amount of emails that you sent/ received from a specific contact
• The time the contact is used to email
• Shared contacts
• Recent conversations
• Shared attachements

All this information gives you a fast overview of the contact and her/ his recent email activity.

Download your copy today.

Review: VMware Project North Star (Thinstall) Beta 2

Today I received an email with a new beta release of VMware Project North Star. The new beta offers two new feaures.

Application Dependency Mapping allows you to links individual thinstalled application. A single JRE can for example be used in several thinstalled applications. That is good news!

An other new feature is Application Sync. The thinstalled application is configured to sync with a central source server to ensure the thinstalled application is still the same. This feature can be used for security purpose, but also for application update purpose.

During packaging I also mentioned an easy way to link an application to a specific security group in Active Directory. I would normally NOT use this feature to have security in the package itself, but it is still a nice feature for those, who want to link a application to Active Directory.

Besides the new features, the GUI has been changed to ease the packaging process. The new GUI also supports the new features.

So… a good step forward.