Back in January I blogged about the Outlook Social Connector, and how it will allow you to bring your business and social networking together in the place you spend most of your working day – your Inbox.
Until now, this functionality has been limited to tracking “social” information and activity such as document posting and tagging, site activity, and your colleague’s status and profile updates from SharePoint Server 2010. Pretty cool yes, but also pretty close to home (or work, I guess).
This week, the Office 2010 team made two announcements that will up the ante, and help frumpy old Outlook focus on something other than work, work, work…
Firstly they announced that the LinkedIn integration for the Outlook Social Connector is now available for you to download and try at www.LinkedIn.com/outlook. This download brings together the world’s most popular professional network with the world’s leading professional inbox. So now you can stay current on your LinkedIn business contacts’ status updates, and expand your own network from within Outlook. And whenever someone in your network changes a phone number, e-mail address, job title, or other contact details, the Outlook Social Connector will automatically sync the changes with you Outlook contact information, so you’re always up to date.
The second announcement was of two key new partnerships with Facebook, the world’s leading social website, and MySpace to develop their own Outlook Social Connector integrations in the near future. So stay tuned for more news on those integrations soon, and look forward to seeing more of your friends and family in the near future – if only in your inbox.
You can read details on how to get started, and see a brief Channel 9 video with the whole story on The Official Microsoft Blog.
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