I like meeting people and I'm involved in a fair number of activities including my job that requires me to communicate with a large number of people frequently, some of whom I may have only had a few conversations with in the past.

My favourite new tool is without a doubt, Copernic Desktop Search from www.copernic.com.

It only works on Windows at this point (look for my Mac conversion to Windows blog post soon...) but if you are using Windows Outlook, Exchange, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird, it can index your email, contacts, and files. For Exchange users, it will even index the global address list.

I am currently also using Salesforce.com as my primary work CRM. That syncs to my Outlook. Then Copernic indexes my Outlook.

So with that one search field on my taskbar, I can find contacts anywhere in my company or in my list of accounts in Salesforce. I can also find every email to, from, or about that person instantly. If I want to find all of the emails that were sent to or from "XYZ.com", I just type that in and instantly have a date ordered list of all of my email related to that company.

Overall, you have much more control of everything with Copernic than you do with Google Desktop Search which I found way too clunky and simple for my taste. You can choose which email folders to index and how frequently. You can also choose which contacts to index (personal or personal and Global Address List in Exchange.)

Overall, this is a great tool and I would highly recommend that other people try it to see if they use it as much as I do on a daily basis.