Outlook 2010’s half-baked social networking tool

Among my LinkedIn information, my Twitter feed (@JPBruzzese), my Facebook site, and the other social and business networks that I use, a person could really catch up on all I’ve been up to — if they only knew where to look. Conversely, I could get a snapshot of another person’s comings and goings by peering into the same social and business networks. But it would be much easier if I could peruse the gambit of networks a person is posting to through one tool.

Microsoft has included a new feature in Outlook 2010 called the Social Connector. It can pull information from LinkedIn and MySpace, as well as connect internally with a SharePoint 2010 server to receive work-oriented updates, such as newly tagged documents and site activity. Connecting to external networks requires that you download a provider for each network; planned providers include Facebook and Windows Live.

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The Outlook Social Connector displays discreetly in the bottom of your Preview pane and allows you to see email threads, meetings, and shared documents with the person you’ve selected, so it’s easy to track your communication and collaboration history.

The purpose of the Social Connector is clear, but the solution is only half-baked; for example, Facebook and Windows Live are missing from the list of providers, and Twitter is not included. Microsoft focused on making sure it worked with SharePoint 2010 (it does) because that is where Microsoft sees the connector shining for corporate use.

After working with Outlook 2010 and SharePoint 2010 together, I agree 100 percent it makes sense to have a one-stop shop for your users to merge the experience where they communicate (through Outlook) and collaborate (with SharePoint). Third-party developers can also connect and feed social streams from line-of-business apps or integrate their own services into Outlook through the Social Connector. But few people only use internal business social networking tools, so Social Connector remains somewhat of an island.

Fortunately, other tools can do what Social Connector can’t. One is Gist, which goes beyond the mindset of “it’s who you know” and into the realm of “it’s what you know about who you know.”

One example is a businessperson who recently emailed me. Because I had the Gist connector for Outlook installed, I could quickly see in a side pane what that person has been up to recently. Gist told me his recent Twitter tweets, any recent news about him, blog posts, Facebook info, LinkedIn info, recent correspondence between the two of us (including attachments, meeting appointments from my calendar, and email connection), and anything else it could find on him. while also incorporating news from more than 20 million blogs and another 50,000-plus news sources. With Gist, I can quickly request a dossier on a person and get all that information in one page to review before making a decision on where our relationship is going next from a business perspective.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t like the idea of the Outlook Social Connector or Gist, but after working with both for a month, I can see the potential of the Outlook Social Connector as it matures and as enterprises deploy SharePoint 2010. Now, I cannot live without my Gist connector. I find myself using it all the time because it doesn’t require additional work. I simply look over to my Gist pane while working on email and pick up the latest information about people I correspond with.

It’s apparent that both Microsoft and Gst are evolving their products. Gist just released an iPhone app, with an Android app coming soon, and it has plug-ins for Lotus Notes, Outlook, and Gmail (one of Google’s new “contextual gadgets”). Whereas the Outlook Social Connector is locked into Outlook 2010, the Gist tools can plug in to multiple platforms.

There are other connectors besides Outlook Social Connector and Gist, of course. What have you been working with? Do you consider these types of connectors to be more social networking oriented or do you see an enterprise value to their use? Leave a comment to let us know.

This article, “Outlook 2010’s half-baked social networking tool,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com.