Considering that I use Outlook to interact with people (or used to — I went Gmail last year), it seems absurd that the application has never allowed a people-centric view of email communication — until now, that is. Last night, the Microsoft Outlook team announced the Outlook Social Connector (OSC), an add-on that's available now as part of the Office 2010 beta (see all stories on TechMeme). It adds a new 'People Pane' where you can see:
- Picture name and title of the sender
- History of recent emails with that person
- Attachments you've shared and any upcoming meetings
- Activity feeds from social networks they belong to
Pretty cool, huh? This is the sort of must-have feature that, as soon as you hear about it, you wonder why it wasn't added years ago. Although, remembering how clunky Outlook search tends to be, you may want to hang on until you've found out how effortlessly it generates that message history as you toggle from one contact to another. As Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta writes:
"I'll take a 'wait and see' perspective re: user experience and performance. User experience is going to be a high bar for me. Interoperability will also be key ..."
There's also the question of how long you'll have to wait until you can start using it with your own instance of Outlook (warning: this is where I climb on my SaaS/cloud hobby-horse). You can install it now provided you're happy to work with the 2010 beta, and there will also be versions for use with Outlook 2003 and 2007, but the production version doesn't ship until next year. Those links to external social networks have to get written yet, using an SDK that's available from today. The first to be announced is from LinkedIn, and that won't ship until 'early 2010'. Oh and by the way, to feed them into Outlook, your company will need to install SharePoint 2010.
It's the usual, oh-so-painful, on-premise software story. You get all excited about a brand new feature, and then you realize you have to:
- Wait till it ships
- Get budget for the upgrade
- Plan and implement the upgrade
By the time you get through all those steps (assuming you're lucky enough not to fall at one of the hurdles) it's six to eighteen months later and that shiny new feature is looking distinctly jaded in comparison to the latest new thing. (One more reason to junk your on-premise servers and at least switch to Microsoft Online Services).
I concede that Gmail doesn't have those features today, but what's the betting it will by the time even the faster-moving Outlook users have implemented OSC? And the killer feature of SaaS/cloud is that, as soon as any social network, be it LinkedIn or any other, has implemented its connector, every single user of the cloud service it links to will instantly be able to take advantage of it, without any further downloads or installs required. The reality of the on-premise world is that, even when it seems to be ahead of the game, its users are struggling to play catch-up.
Outlook 2010 seems to be coming with a lot of key features. I am curious how this impacts companies selling email archiving, and when you talk about social connectivity, companies like Xobni.
Xobni has partnerships with linkedin, hoovers, etc and provides that person centric view, plus connectivity into erp systems etc. The one difference is that it is hosted so aside from an agent that gets downloaded to outlook, there isn't a lot of effort to get it working.
I have used it in the past, and our company just became an authorized reseller for their licensed product. There is also a free version.