For three months, I have been using Xobni, a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook which removes a lot of the pain of using this widely-used but widely-unpopular application.

If you have trouble remembering the product’s name, it’s ‘inbox’ backwards. It works by indexing all your emails, not just those in your inbox. This gives you instant recall of emails by sender/recipient or by content.

Last week, after seven months of pre-beta trials, the product was launched to the public. I sent out several invites to use it to friends and they are all rather smitten.

When not in use, it sits quietly in a narrow sidebar in your Outlook, showing details of the sender or recipient of the current email. Without expanding the bar, you can see the size of their network (derived from cc’s and such), how many conversations you’ve had with them and how many files you’ve exchanged. Expand the bar and you can see their telephone number and scrollable lists of the items just mentioned.

Here’s a shrunken screen shot with the sidebar showing:

And here’s the sidebar expanded (I’ve deliberately shaded my phone number):

You can call people from Skype, email them or schedule time with them, all from inside Xobni. You can also see a pattern of when they’re most active, email-wise. This is borne out of the company’s original intention to be an email analytics firm.

If you use search, then you get back matching people and emails. Click on an email and you can reply, forward or open. You can also view the conversation and this has a dinky slider which enables you to see more, or less, of each email in the list.

Like so many programs, it is easier to just have a go than to have someone try to explain it in print. I have ten invites to send out, if anyone’s interested (send me your email address). But it’s just as easy to go to the Xobni site and pick up your own free copy.

Xobni runs on Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Vista with Outlook 2003 or 2007. Once installed, you do nothing. It is automatically updated when the program is improved.

If you’re anything like me, you mostly use the powerful search to find stuff that you know is in there somewhere. The rest is icing on an already tasty cake.

Are you assaulted daily by people claiming to make you greener? Do you listen?

I must confess that I get irritated by many of them because they’re using my guilt to stuff their pockets with money. And, very often, what they’re offering as a ‘cure’ to CO2 emissions or pollution actually turn out to be emitters and polluters in their own right, through their use of raw materials, manufacturing processes and delivery.

For example, do we really need one button to switch off multiple devices? Can’t we just take thirty seconds to switch them off individually. Or run them off a power block and switch that off? Or, as I do, use power blocks with individual switches, so that I only power the items that I’m using at any time. (I’m not claiming any great environmental virtuousness, by the way.) Perhaps the manufacturers would be able to tell us how much switching things off standby results in a nett gain to the environment.

Then you have the measuring things. They tell you how much power you’re using. Well, if you’re being sensible with your power use, do you need a measure? It’s a bit like bathroom scales. In my case, they merely confirm to me what I can see by looking in a mirror.

Okay, measurement can be useful. You can log progress and ‘prove’ to whoever needs to know that you are doing a better job than you used to do. This, no doubt, will come in handy for reporting your carbon footprint to those who wish to tax you. (Or reward you? I won’t be holding my breath.) Some computer companies are licking their lips at the prospect of selling you even more hardware and software just to enable you to keep track of, and report, this kind of thing.

Without question, a conscientious approach to the use of raw materials and noxious emissions is very important. It always has been. But, when faced with a green product or service, do take a moment to work out whose bottom line is really being served.

I spent a goodly chunk of last week in California and kept bumping into people who bandied about the term ‘cloud computing’. Without question, the phrase is heading your way. And, without question, someone will soon try and bamboozle you with it.

This is because not all clouds are equal. And some have simply replaced one techie term for another less techie one. Software as a Service, or SaaS, has been mentioned here before. Well this is a kind of junior partner in the world of clouds. More senior (and more complicated) are Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service - PaaS and IaaS respectively. You can see why the more fluffy and friendly word ‘cloud’ has been adopted as an umbrella term for them all.

The tragedy is that great swathes of people in the IT world are now able to bandy ‘cloud’ around in the same way that they bandied ‘Web 2.0′ a couple of years ago. Your job as a buyer/user of IT systems and services is to keep asking what this stuff means, what improvements are going to be delivered to the bottom line and how they’re to be delivered. Don’t let the folk in metaphorical white coats intimidate you.

If the service on offer sits apart from your day to day applications, then a bit of cloud computing might do you some good. It means someone else is able to take care of all the awkward bits - buying equipment, installing software, maintaining both, dealing with peak demands and so on. Salesforce.com has been particularly successful with its SaaS offering. 41,000 companies use its service for customer relationship and sales tracking. Its success hinges on the fact that it can be run quite independently of other applications. It also has a PaaS offering in its AppExchange which allows other companies to add extra functionality to the underlying salesforce.com platform.

Other cloud computing companies, such as IaaS and SaaS provider Joyent, provide somewhere to run your applications so that they scale to meet whatever demands are placed upon them. Its own Collaboration Suite is another example of a SaaS application which runs independently of your other software. IBM, HP, Microsoft and hordes of other companies are talking cloud computing. John Willis has produced a list of 47 cloud offerings on his IT Management and Cloud blog. If this sort of thing interests you, you might also like to read Kent Langley’s take on the whole subject.

The good things about cloud computing are that they remove complexity and provisioning from the customer and they keep capital and staffing costs low. In theory, at least, they should keep operational costs low too. But I’d be worried about being locked into a service provider that gives no escape route should they decide to raise prices unreasonably.

If you’re thinking of doing anything that involves applications working together, then be very careful and make sure you have good independent advice, or rock solid guarantees from your cloud provider.

If you have to buy or sell your goods or services in foreign currencies, you know what damage an exchange rate shift can do to you. Especially if there are long gaps between the deal, the delivery and the payment.

Large companies, those in the Footsie 350 say, have online trading systems and get favourable rates from their banks and brokers. Everyone else pays through the nose if they want to protect themselves against unwelcome fluctuations.

Well, no more. A company called 4X Currency Corporation plc has extended its existing 4X Dealer spot trading system to accommodate forward trades. Once enrolled, a customer can execute a trade online in a matter of seconds. Dealing rates are favourable, no commissions have to be paid and global transmission is free.

The amount delivered at the settlement date (up to 12 months ahead) is based on the rate of exchange at the time of the trade. A deposit (usually 10 percent) is required up front and this is refunded on settlement. (It’s there to help protect 4X in the event of a customer reneging on the trade.)

Once registered - you have to supply a letter on company letterhead - you get the access software. It installs fairly quickly and is so unobtrusive that 4X is even considering putting it onto mobile phones. It looks like this:

It’s more visible at full scale, of course.

You might enjoy this YouTube movie of Managing Director, Helen Scott explaining all. Or read her blog post.

You know those diddly little memory drives (variously called thumbdrives, USB drives, Flash drives or memory sticks) that plug into the USB port of a computer? Ever thought about how dangerous they might be? Each one can hold massive amounts of information - even the tiniest holds 256MB - but four times that is commonplace. By the end of 2008 one manufacturer, SanDisk, reckons it will be up to 128GB.

Go to a conference or an exhibition and it’s highly likely you get a thumbdrive packed with information from various exhibiting companies. It’s cheaper than printing stuff and it has a residual use which is of value to the recipient. Looking around my desk, I can see half a dozen - five promotional ones plus a real one that I actually bought. I’m sure more are tucked away in pockets and bags. And all contain masses of information. The ones I fear losing most are those that contain ‘my life’ when I’m about to go on a trip and make a quick backup of all the key stuff in case the laptop goes ‘phut’ and I have to borrow someone else’s.

Do you know whether people in your organisation bring thumbdrives into and out of work? Do you know whether they habitually copy stuff to work on outside? Or bring stuff in from outside to work on in the office? Either way, you are exposed to risks. Inbound devices containing malicious code which could threaten your system. Outbound devices exposing you to the risks associated with information theft or loss.

SanDisk commissioned a survey among corporate end users and IT staff. 25 percent of users were likely to copy customer records to a thumb drive. 17 percent would copy financial information. 15 percent business plans. 13 percent employee records. It goes on, but you get the general idea.

Unlike a CD which is difficult to conceal, the thumbdrives can lurk anywhere. Physical searches would have to be very intimate to ensure that none of these devices are passing your threshold in either direction.

Measures to deal with the risk vary from user education to central control of the ports on user machines. Somewhere in the middle is the filling of every spare USB port with epoxy resin and supergluing the connectors in the remainder

The best way to get the latest infortmation is to run a Google search for USB drive security 2008.

We received a survey last week which was embargoed to yesterday. “Strange”, I thought, “to have a Sunday embargo on something.” On reading the survey, Behind the Wheel II from the Energy Saving Trust, the penny dropped. It’s the start of a new tax year and the content of the survey - about cars and the environment - was germane to new measures taken by the Chancellor.

The Energy Saving Trust receives 98.67 percent of its money from government bodies. Two thirds of the small remainder are energy companies and hangers-on. This doesn’t alter the value of what it’s doing, but it is as well to know this kind of thing up front.

Fundamentally, the survey was pointing out the benefits of adopting green strategies for fleet car management. Although the report occasionally slipped into ‘company vehicle’ mode, it concentrated mainly on cars for business use. And, its main thrust was to urge companies to select vehicles with emissions of 120g/km or less with the main benefit of improving the bottom line for companies and fleet car users. As you might expect, the aim is to deliver environmental benefit as well.

According to the excellent Clean Green Cars motoring guide, you can choose from 30 cars at this level. I should mention that three ‘city cars’ are more or less identical, dropping the choice to 28. However, the 100 percent first-year capital allowance on car purchases has just dropped from sub-120g/km cars to those under 110g/km. Have you tried finding a car under 110g/km? (I have - I ended up at 139g/km. Smack, smack, naughty boy. Except I had my reasons.) The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic IMA are the only two family-sized cars that fit the bill. Or you can choose from three superminis and the multi-manufacturer city car (Toyota Aygo, Citroen C1 and Peugeot 107) mentioned above.

The report notes that 49 percent of companies have a formal ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Environmental Policy’. Of those who do, only 33 percent address the impact of motor vehicles. If they were to take things more seriously then they could save money through fuel savings and lower taxes and duties, improve their environmental credentials which would help them secure work from large organisations and they could polish their public image to boot.

The report talks of upcoming taxes, like Vehicle Excise Duty for the largest cars rising to £950 in the first year and £455 in subsequent years. This comes into force in 2010. The impact on the residual value is likely to impact vehicle leasing costs. And, of course fuel costs are not going to stay still.

If you’re interested in the full sweep of the discussion, read the document. Or contact the Energy Saving Trust for a fleet survey. But always bear in mind that a lot of energy and raw materials go into building and shipping new vehicles to you. It may be that hanging on to a car for a bit longer could be the most environmentally friendly action you could take.

As editor Alex suggested, one day we could “get prestige for turning up in an old banger, rather than the latest model with a new reg plate.”

Nice one Alex.