Microsoft wants to grow your LinkedIn network with everyone you collaborate or converse with, so it’s adding ‘Profile Cards’ to its Office 365 apps for making quick connections.
The new feature, which will surface your contacts’ LinkedIn profiles in Microsoft services starting next month, should make it easier to learn about who you’re working with, whether they’re your colleagues from a remote team or a potential client you’ve been pitching to. In addition to viewing their info, you can also add these contacts right from within the app.
It’s the first major use of the professional social network that the Redmond giant has made, since it acquired LinkedIn for over $26 billion last year.
The company says you’ll start to see Profile Cards first in Enterprise Outlook Web, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business next month. It’ll then roll out to personal accounts for Outlook Web, and subsequently other desktop and mobile versions of Outlook, as well as other Office apps, over the coming months.
It’ll be interesting to see if Profile Cards also make their way into Teams, which is Microsoft’s answer to Slack. That could make it a truly useful tool for killing off slow and tedious email chains between companies, partners and clients as they work together on projects. The company is already moving enterprise customers away from its aging Skype for Business chat tool towards Teams; this seems like the next logical step.
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