LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, has become the first social network to announce a “working” relationship with Microsoft Outlook Social Connector. Social Connector is Microsoft’s way to merge all your online connections and social activities into the outlook user interface. There are clear advantages and reasons for Microsoft attempting this network merge into their current offerings, but I am not going to dive into that aspect of things. Rather, I decided I would play around with the Beta. The steps can be found here, but as most Windows users know, they entail: DOWNLOAD, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH, RESTART
You then have to go to the LinkedIn site and download their plug-in. This is pretty much the same procedure as above. After a few restarts to Outlook, you should have a new contact folder called LinkedIn. I have pulled up my own profile for privacy purposes, but you can see it will automatically link to your LinkedIn profile picture(which is part of my team and I at our charity golf outing). This plug-in is definitely not for those that are camera shy with their email contacts.

However, there are some nice features to both products. Here is a better image of the social connector window pane that gets added as a 3rd pane to your outlook window.

There are a total of 6 tabs that you can choose in this pane: 1. the current shown, which is an aggregation of the other 5, 2. news feed updates, 3. emails, 4. Attachments sent by this individual, 5. calendar items shared with this person, and 6. status updates (ie. the LinkedIn updates that you share with your LinkedIn connections)
I found the attachments tab to be the most useful. These tabs act as an auto-sort for you, which is already a feature in Outlook, but the attachments tab produces the last 10 or so attachments sent by this individual. It enables you to find attachments without having to scour through emails hoping to know the name of the attachment that you are looking for. It is a pretty handy feature!
The status updates are currently on hiatus for me, I have separate work/LinkedIn emails, so they are not updating at this point. However, it could be a useful feature to have real time information on what is going through your contacts head. Or in other words, the potential to a better way to email market in real time! In my opinion, it’s worth the 5 minutes of install to spend a day and see if it is useful.