LinkedIn and Microsoft join hands to offer an add-on that integrates much of your LinkedIn contact information with your Outlook contacts. The add on is beneficial as when the member of LinkedIn send you an email Outlook will show a collapsible pane that will showcase all latest activity of the user on LinkedIn. The add-on will also show you the most recent professional information about a contact, most recent job and city.
The information which you can fetch from LinkedIn to Outlook are picture of contacts (which they placed at LinkedIn profile), recently connected person and last but not the least any status updates LinkedIn User has posted on the site.
Users can easily invite Linkedin members to connect within Outlook (but presently you cannot accept invitations, might be in future you can )
The add-on will ship with Microsoft 2010, but can be downloaded to work with Outlook 2003, and 2007. While social network has an Outlook toolbar that has been available for some time, this appears to be the first major partnership between LinkedIn and Microsoft.
LinkedIn’s Director of Product Development, Elliot Shmukler told that the key idea behind this partnership is to bring such product where LinkedIn professionals can do their work and Outlook has a fundamentally professional user base. Just few weeks back LinkedIn has joined hands with twitter also.