Integrating LinkedIn With Outlook Email.

 

Per this story earlier in the week at the San Francisco Chronicle, Microsoft Outlook users now have the option of integrating their LinkedIn accounts with their Outlook email via a “Outlook Social Connector” now available from Microsoft.  

Upon downloading and installing the Outlook Social Connector,  Outlook will aggregate contact information from both the user’s LinkedIn and Outlook accounts. Additionally, a summary of the contact’s most recent LinkedIn activity, status updates, accepted connections and e-mails is provided in a new window pane under an e-mail to the contact.  If the contact with which the user is corresponding is not yet connected by LinkedIn, the user can simply select and request to add them to the user’s LinkedIn network through the Outlook interface.

For those interested in trying the out the new Outlook Social Connector, click here to download the latest version from Microsoft.

JW Note:  It remains to be seen whether this will help push LinkedIn toward use as an effective business tool, or if it will just result in another way of wasting time by social networking.  So far, our initial trial with the Outlook Social Connector has been promising.  If you want to link in with me, feel free to visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/jakeward and request to add me to your network!