Installation of the Microsoft Outlook add-on should not pose a problem. Users need to make sure that Outlook is closed during installation. The wizard that is displayed after installation can be skipped by clicking next all the time, no personal data needs to be entered.

A new Text Lightning entry is added to Outlook’s toolbar which offers access to the add-in’s features. The add-in furthermore adds a sidebar to the right of the new email message window for quick access to pre-configured texts, images and files.

The main feature of Text Lightning is the ability to create and use text modules. The available text modules can then be added to email messages with a double-click, via individual keyboard shortcuts or drag and drop.

New text modules are added with the shortcut Ctrl-N or a right-click on the sidebar and the selection of Add Quick Text from the context menu. Text can be imported as well either from a file or a folder with multiple files. Supported file formats for single file import are Microsoft Excel xls and Comma-Separated text csv files, for folder import HTML, text and TextLightning files.

The add-in supports both plain text and rich text. One interesting option is the ability to add files to text modules which are then automatically added as attachments.

Another interesting option is product guessing. This basically can be used to configure products that Text Lightning tries to identify in email messages to only display relevant text modules.

Text Lightning can be downloaded from the developer website over at Xequte. The developers are unfortunately not listing compatibility information on the website. The add-in worked flawlessly under Outlook 2010. (via)

The installation of the Facebook add-on for Outlook takes only a few seconds and requires no user interaction at all. New buttons are added to the Outlook toolbar that become visible on the next start of the email client.

It is obviously required to log into Facebook before information can be retrieved and send to the online service. This is done by clicking on the Login to Facebook button in Outlook. It will spawn a new browser window or tab that is displaying the Facebook login page. The user has to log in and confirm the log in in Outlook to be able to use the controls in the email client.

From then on its possible to use all the features provided by the Microsoft Outlook add-on. One interesting option provided is to update the Facebook status using the music track played in either Windows Media Player or iTunes.

A double-click on a folder in the Outlook add-on will open it directly in a new Microsoft Outlook window. It is furthermore possible to copy mails to the folders in the Outlook add-on which might prove to be a quicker way for users with lots of folders. This can be done by right-clicking selected emails in Outlook and selecting “Move Selected email to this folde” or by using the shortcut [Ctrl V]. Folders can be added to favorites for quick access.

The second interesting option that is provided by Hana Outlook Folder Search is to remove email duplicates from selected folders. The add-on can automatically check for duplicate emails. This is done by checking the message-id headers and comparing it to emails that have been received in the last 48 hours.

The Microsoft Outlook add-on is definitely not an add-on for every Outlook user. The duplicate mail detection might make it interesting for users that do not use the add-on’s main search feature.