With a move that is set to bring the news-feeds of millions of Facebook fans to inboxes around the world, Microsoft announced the integration of Outlook, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger.
The development last year of the Outlook Social Connector plug-in gave users the ability to sync social networking feeds to Outlook contacts. The LinkedIn integration worked well but the new plug-in will be a huge step up, bringing Windows Live Messenger, as well as Facebook, to your Outlook inbox.
Don’t have the latest version of Outlook on your system? Don’t worry, Microsoft is also expected to release the new plug-in for Outlook 2003 and 2007.
What can you expect from the integration? Well, when you’re reading an email, not only will it capture the Facebook profile photo to allow you to see the person behind the name, you will also see uploaded photos, wall posts, status updates and other actions. Knowing when one of your clients’ has had an important milestone in their life, marriage, new child, or even just going on a vacation could give you the advantage over your competitors.
With the combination of social networking plug-ins such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger, you will be able to gain detailed knowledge of your contacts and clients interests and activities.
Updates in real-time are also to be a feature with the additional release today of an inclusion to the Social Connector plug-in. Any Facebook status updates from your contacts will also be sent to your inbox, removing the need for you to manually refresh within Outlook.
The plug-in is expected to have its limitations however, with the exception of receiving friend requests, Outlook will only be able to grab information from Facebook. It is not expected that you will be able to update your status or ‘like’ posts through Outlook at this stage.
It is a ‘given’ these days that social network data is of growing importance to the business community, knowledge of what your clients and competitors are doing can give you the edge you need to succeed, although privacy will always remain a big issue.
The Outlook integration will only post feeds from email accounts linked to Facebook. The user will get the choice on what email accounts to link and if your Facebook account isn’t linked to your business email the data feed will not be posted.
For more information on the new plug-in Microsoft has released a short video – Facebook and Windows Live for Outlook Social Connector
You can also download the plugin from the Microsoft Download Center.
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