The vast majority of our clients rely heavily on Outlook to manage their email, calendars & meetings on a day to day basis.  Because of this, cBizOne has always had a very tight integration with Outlook through our proprietary plugin, cBizBar.  cBizBar has worked great for many years with very few updates needed or requested from our users.  Mostly because “it just works the way it should”.

Now that a large percentage of our clients have moved over to cBizOne Cloud, the relationship between your cBizOne database and Outlook is slowly starting to shift. With cBizOne Cloud your database is hosted online for easy access from any computer, but the integration between Outlook and cBizOne still happens on your local desktop.

This isn’t a problem right now.  However, as we prepare for the launch of Exelare, we need a good solution to keep the Outlook integration you love – but also remove the physical tie between Outlook on your desktop and your database in the cloud.  Confused yet?

Let me explain.

If you are a cBizOne Cloud user, the connection between Outlook & cBizOne happens on your local computer and THEN the data is pushed to your cloud database. This works great for now.

Once you upgrade to the xBar inside of Outlook, it will replace the need for the cBizBar and your new setup will be connected to the database in the cloud directly.  It does not need the local connection with cBizOne to work.   If you want to simply open up Outlook and reply to a few emails or submit a few resumes, you don’t even have to open up Exelare or cBizOne.  Everything you do will be tracked like normal and your history will be waiting inside of the software whenever you need it.

Here is a video explaining the changes.  Use this link if you can’t see the video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxzyB81scs

Why The Change?  Why Now?

As we continue to develop features for Exelare, our main goal is to make the transition from a desktop environment (cBizOne) to a fully web based environment (Exelare) as easy as possible for our clients.  The xBar is just a small step on that journey.  Users of cBizOne Cloud can install the xBar right away and get the full benefits of a cloud integrated Outlook.  At some point in the future if/when you make the switch to Exelare, the Outlook integration will already be 100% intact – nothing new to learn.

What Is Different?

The xBar will look very familiar to you and works almost identically to the cBizBar you are using now.  That being said, there are some handy upgrades that we think you’ll like:

  1. Improved Parsing Technology – We have an updated parsing engine that is both faster and more accurate than the previous parser.
  1. Submit Resumes From Inside of Outlook – You can easily submit candidates to contacts directly from inside of Outlook.  Just hit the “submit” button and the xBar will let you attach candidate resumes from your cloud hosted database directly.

Stuff you need to know

The xBar is only available to cBizOne Cloud (formerly called “cBizOne Hosted”) clients.  Users of cBizOne Standard & cBizOne Pro host their databases on local networks so it doesn’t make sense to upgrade to the xBar.  If you are a cBizOne Standard user and want to upgrade to cBizOne Cloud, just shoot us an  email at: marketing@cbizsoft.com

If you are a current cBizOne Cloud user, click this link to download and install the new xBar:

Click Here to Download the xBar Plugin for Outlook

You will need your company ID, User Name & Password to connect the xBar to your cloud database.

Again, please download the xBar ONLY if you are a cBizOne Cloud user.  If you are unsure what type of cBizOne user you are, please email us at support@cbizsoft.com and we will help you.

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We hope you like this new integration as much as we do!  We feel very confident saying that we have the tightest integration with Outlook in the entire Staffing & Recruiting Software Industry.  No other vendor supplies a true integration of Outlook the way that we do.  Please let us know what you think about it in the comments below and stay tuned for more announcements about cBizOne & Exelare!

Oh, and one more thing.  If you haven’t signed up to try Exelare yet, head on over to the sign up page and let us know you are interested!