If, like me, you are starting to embrace social networking and the networked economy, you now have networks in your email address book, on LinkedIn, Ecademy and elsewhere. Given that these networks all overlap, you are beginning to get frustrated that you need to manage each of them separately. Here’s a new tool that eases a good chunk of that frustration.

I am referring to the Outlook Social Connector, a new feature of Microsoft Outlook. Eventually there will be plugins to use with OSC that link Outlook to all the big social networks, but for the moment LinkedIn is the only one available. It’s a good place to start.

Installation is simple. If you have Outlook 2003 or 2007, download and install the OSC module. If you have Outlook 2010, it’s already there. Users with an earlier version of Outlook should think about upgrading (and not just for this feature)! Then download and install the LinkedIn plugin. The next time you start Outlook you will be offered the opportunity to use the LinkedIn plugin. Select it and you are away.

You will notice a new “People Pane” at the bottom of the Reading Pane, showing you information about the person who sent you the email in view.

This includes recent updates to the sender’s LinkedIn status, emails and attachments received, forthcoming calendar events. It’s all useful stuff, and valuable even without the LinkedIn connection. The People Pane also appears when you open a record in your contacts folder.

Also created is a contacts folder with all your LinkedIn contacts, again very useful.

The only slight drawback occurs if you receive an email from someone in your LinkedIn contacts, but using a different email address than the one in their LinkedIn record. The system won’t make the connection. But it’s easily rectified. Add the email address from the LinkedIn record to the record in your main contacts folder.

Check it out!

See also:

• Geert Conard’s blog article that first alerted me to this great feature.