With Office 2010 Microsoft introduced a platform for expansion into social networking in email client Outlook.
Social Outlook Connector provides access to history, photos, contacts, events and status updates from various online services. From before, LinkedIn and MySpace to the list of supported web services, not to mention Microsoft's own SharePoint.
This week, Microsoft introduced support for the Facebook and instant messengers Windows Live (Messenger). In addition, the said platform for the first time also available for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.
Users of Office 2010 can get the extension through the update service, Microsoft Update, while those who have older versions of office suite must obtain this yourself from the Microsoft Download Center. Then, support for Facebook and Live service is downloaded from, respectively, this and this website.
With the solution in place you get the opportunity to follow what your contacts are doing in the various social networks right from Outlook, by activating a separate window for this.
How rich functionality will depend on your contacts privacy settings in the various web services. (They decide what is shared).
The integration is so far one way, but Microsoft plans to expand functionality. In the long run it may be appropriate to allow users to update and publish content on the various service tests directly from Outlook.
Microsoft introduces news in this blog post, which also includes a video clip with a brief overview of how it all works in practice.
