The Original Microsoft Team, born socialites
The latest big brand to announce a social network collaboration is Microsoft. The Windows giant are looking to incorporate Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn features with the hugely popular Outlook e-mail client. The Personal Information Manager feature will grant access to user pages, contacts, messaging systems, events and meetings on all three social networks.
By making this a reality Microsoft will go head-to-head with competitor products that currently allow users to work remotely on their multiple social networks from a single application or website (e.g. FriendFeed).
On their official blog Microsoft announced that all Office 2010 users will be able to connect their LinkedIn account with the new Outlook Social Connector tool. Microsoft have also announced a collaboration with Facebook which will see the integration of more social functions in the near future.
The LinkedIn features are currently in Beta and users can test status updates, photo upload and contact messaging. More features will arrive with the final version.
The big question that remains unanswered regards access. Microsoft Outlook, including Exchange, powers around 65% of enterprise email accounts and a lot of those companies have restricted social network access to their employees to avoid them to wasting time. What will happen when we are to update our profile status or chat in real time with our Facebook contacts directly from our corporate e-mail software? Only time will tell…
