Yesterday: Microsoft announced Outlook Social Connector, a new feature of Office 2010 that connects social networking feeds and information to the Outlook inbox. Appropriately, the first partner will be LinkedIn , whose business social networking information will be integrated throughout Outlook.

The new LinkedIn integration, which will be coming soon to the Office 2010 beta, offers a slew of interesting features. The first major integration is connections: the network updates of your LinkedIn contacts (status updates, new connections, etc.) will be accessible whenever you receive an email form one of them. Here’s what it will look like:

The other bonus of the add-on is the synchronization between Outlook and LinkedIn contacts. Outlook will bring automatically consolidate information for existing contacts who are LinkedIn contacts and new LinkedIn contacts. Plus, you can send messages to a LinkedIn contact directly from Outlook. And if a contact in Outlook changes any contact information within LinkedIn, Outlook will automatically be updated too.

The add-on will ship with Microsoft 2010, but can be downloaded to work with Outlook 2003, and 2007. While social network has a Outlook toolbar that has been available for some time, this appears to be the first major partnership between LinkedIn and Microsoft.

LinkedIn’s Director of Product Development, Elliot Shmukler says that the fundamental idea behind the product is to bring the value of LinkedIn to where professionals do their work and Outlook has a fundamentally professional userbase. LinkedIn also partnered with IBM’s Lotus Notes and Xobni, providing a similar integration. But what about Google Apps? Shmukler declined to comment directly on a potential partnership but did say that there will be future integrations with additional email clients in the near future.

The past few weeks have seen a few key partnerships for LinkedIn. The connection with Microsoft is a huge, considering the widespread user of Microsoft Outlook in professional environments. LinkedIn also recently launched integration with Twitter, enabling Tweets to be sent from LinkedIn’s platform and more.

Related Posts
		Download Office 2010 Home and Business Click to Run Public Beta
		Microsoft’s Office 2010 Complete Guide
		Microsoft Office News: Microsoft Released Office 2010 Beta
		Microsoft Owner Domain Name Office.com
		Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 9(IE9) Platform Preview
		Windows Phone 7 Series is Here!
		Microsoft Reveals Windows Phone 7 Details And Dev Partners
		Microsoft Tag: Microsoft First Android App
		WinMo 6.5 will not be upgraded to Windows Phone 7
		Nexus One coming Verizon March 23rd?

Hello there! If you find this page useful, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed or by Email for updates on this topic.