Microsoft is building LinkedIn into Outlook and other Office apps

Microsoft is planning to more deeply integrate LinkedIn into the company’s Office apps. While we saw some LinkedIn integration in Word last year, Outlook will be updated to include information about contacts for calendar appointments and document sharing. Outlook users will soon be able to coauthor documents with LinkedIn contacts in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, making it a little easier to share documents to friends or coworkers on LinkedIn.

The integration will also extend to business corporate directories, linking a directory with LinkedIn so contacts will appear in Outlook for emails and calendar invites. Some of this information was previously available in a LinkedIn plugin for the Outlook Social Connector, but this need integration will see LinkedIn available directly inside Outlook instead.

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion more than two years ago, and the company has slowly been integrating the business-focused social network into its products. LinkedIn is still largely run as a separate company inside Microsoft, and in the most recent quarter it generated $1.4 billion in revenue (up 37 percent year-over-year).