Outlook Social Connector and Developers

Hopefully you caught the news yesterday at PDC09 that Microsoft Office 2010 beta is now available for download! One of the cool new features added in the beta for Outlook 2010 is the Outlook Social Connector, which connects social network data into Outlook and displays relevant information to you based on the current context.

This is a great feature, and will enable all sorts of great scenarios. Even cooler, it’s a new platform that can be leveraged by developers looking to integrate with Outlook. Today Randy Byrne posted details over on the Outlook blog about how to integrate with the OSC.

Out of the box, Outlook will connect to SharePoint 2010, and we’ve announced a partnership with LinkedIn to connect with as well. However, anyone can build a provider to plug into the OSC and provide data from any data source. Some examples we’ve been thinking of include connecting to an internal CRM system, to show the latest updates about a customer when you receive an e-mail.

If you’re interested, make sure you download the beta and try building an OSC Provider. Click through to Randy’s post for more information.