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.

The new product allows business users to continue using the Outlook client for email and other tasks, but the back-end functionality and data storage would move to Google, instead of residing on a company’s internal servers running Microsoft software.

Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world’s corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies.

Quoting data from Forrester, Google’s David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google’s hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.

Google offers a number of synchronisation tools that work between Outlook and Google Apps, but the new tool wraps everything into a single 5MB plug-in that can be deployed via Microsoft’s System Centre Configuration Manager. In addition, the synchronisation is built into Outlook and is not an additional application outside the client.

According to a post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog details how late adopters are being looked out for: “To help them streamline the transition, we introduced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook to our Premier and Education edition customers,” Matthew Glotzbach of Google explained in an official blog post. “It includes all the elements of Outlook and work easily with Apps and enables offline access to Gmail content when they are not on their work computer — is another example of how we are making it extremely simple to switch to Google Apps.”