Microsoft announced the Outlook Social Connector today. This connector will make it possible to connect information from social networks to Microsoft Outlook. The fist connection that is setup between this new tool and a social network is together with LinkedIn.
The Outlook Social Connector is included with the new Office 2010 beta version and will also be available for download for Office 2003 and 2007 users. The LinkedIn integration offers a few interesting possibilities.
The first feature is that this connection makes it possible to view LinkedIn information like connection and status updates and place it together with a received email if the user is also a connected LinkedIn user. This is how it will look like:
The other thing that was added is contact details synchronization between Outlook contacts and LinkedIn contact information. This is something that I used Plaxo for, but as most of my business network is not available on Plaxo, this was most of the time a lot of typing work as I saw updated coming buy on LinkedIn.
An excellent add-on for Outlook and exactly what was needed. I’m curious to see which social networks or data streams will be added into the feature to this Social Connector. Now I’m waiting for a Gmail version of the tool.
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