LinkedIn Offering Tighter Microsoft Outlook Integration

Email has failed to disappear despite the warnings of social media experts and if Microsoft has anything to say about it MS Outlook is actually about to make email software better. The company has announced that the new version of Office software will come with easier LinkedIn connections for Outlook.

While LinkedIn works with Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 there is at least one big issue that was addressed on Wednesday via the LinkedIn blog:

Today, we’re really excited to share that the Outlook Social Connector for the next release of Office will no longer require an additional download to sync with LinkedIn. This means you just have to sign-in once with your LinkedIn credentials and immediately you’ll start seeing rich profile information, like photos and LinkedIn network activity for any connection that emails you. You’ll also see LinkedIn profile data surface when you view a People Card throughout the new Office experience.

Microsoft then published the following sample image on the Microsoft blog:

As you will notice the email now contained a picture of the sender at the top and along the bottom there’s a status update with a link to a news story via a dynamic LinkedIn social option.

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Microsoft hopes the integration will make it easier for employees to work together remotely while putting a face to a name.

With Google recently purchasing social email startup Sparrow this type of integration was needed by Microsoft and we won’t be surprised to see Apple follow suit in the near future.