Is Outlook going to be the one-stop shop for communication?
This probably isn’t news to many, but Outlook 2010 is going to connect to social networks like Facebook. (I’ve also heard that LinkedIn is in the works.)
This isn’t new technology, at least not outside of Microsoft. For example, I personally use Xobni and love it. (There are some caveats to Xobni, including the fact that it can bog down Outlook a tad on older machines—or at least that’s my experience.) And of course there are other applications and plug-ins out there that mimic some of this, including Google Apps and it’s connect-everything mentality.
The technology in Outlook 2010 is known as Outlook Social Connector (OSC), and there are several key features, including:
- Communication History. Basically, there is a single place to see all correspondence with someone.
- Meetings. Lets you see meetings for just this person. Come to think of it, this should have been available for a long time already.
- Attachments. View all attachments for a user. Xobni has this, and it can be useful.
- Activity Feed. This will be the cool technology for most people, at least if you use social networks. You get to see everything happening with the individual in one place.
So, again, much of this isn’t new. Xobni already provides all of this with Outlook, but it’s a commercial add-on (albeit very inexpensive). The benefits of having this directly available in Outlook is that it becomes part of the Office Suite technology, meaning Microsoft can extend the benefits outside of Outlook and into other components of Office, such as Word (collaborative edits in the future?) and Excel.
It seems apparent that Microsoft is taking existing technology (e.g., Xobni) and moving toward an integration of these concepts into Office. And that is one of the things that Microsoft does best: It doesn’t really invent the technology, but it knows how to integrate it into Windows and Office.
From an end-users perspective, I like the idea. I spend a lot of time in Outlook, and having it provide even more information on the people I work and talk with is only going to help me be more efficient*.
But what are the negatives?
* Let’s be honest: Social networks can really kill your productivity. You should check out life-savers like StayFocusd.
