Putting the Social into Microsoft Outlook

"E-mail. No-one thinks of it as a social app. It's hardly what we think of as Web 2.0, yet it's the most social piece of software most of us use each day."

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw's observation is spot-on. If you were to survey companies today, you'd find that nothing compares to email as the application most actively used by employees. Not wikis, not blogs, not social networks, not anything.

One can abstract out the social aspects of email to see why it is the most social application inside the company:

• Contacts = social graph
• Email threads = online interactions
• Embedded links = information sharing
• Attached documents = content collaboration
• Search = findability and recall

While the next generation of software applications lend themselves significantly better to providing these social characteristics, email will continue to be a dominant form of communication, interaction and sharing in the years ahead. And there are plenty of other uses for email that nothing else can really replace. As Irwin Lazar wrote on the Enterprise 2.0 blog, "let's face it, we aren't giving up email."

Email is the most comprehensive record of employees' social graph, and it's where employees will turn for interactions. So what are some smart ways to leverage that?

Connectbeam Social Profiles Integrated into Microsoft Outlook

Through Spotlight Connect for Outlook, employees' Connectbeam Social Profiles are embedded into every internal email. Here's a screen shot of this integration:

  

What we've put in this profile is the following:

• Contact information, synchronized with LDAP or Active Directory
• Expertise - as created and managed by each employee
• Projects - as created and managed by each employee
• Recent Activity - content created across different social software apps plus bookmarks
• Employee profile toggling - click another email recipient name, see their profile

The social profile makes it easy to see what colleagues are doing and what they know, all at a glance from the Microsoft Outlook inbox.

Leverage Attention to Improve Awareness

The idea is to leverage the attention people give to their inbox and their contacts there. As we wrote in the January 2009 Connect Newsletter, people look to their close contacts first for information. Certainly this is a connections silo that Enterprise 2.0 needs to break, but it's also an opportunity to improve the way in which valuable information is distributed within the organization.

The Connectbeam social profile updates throughout the day as employees go about the work they do anyway. No extra effort is needed to keep the profiles updated. And the activities - bookmarks, wiki entries, blog entries, etc. - are provided as links so others who see something of interest can scan them themselves.

Email Context Extends Employees' Information Connections

An useful dynamic of emails is that recipients can include those who are one's close contacts, as well as colleagues with whom one is less familiar. This becomes the basis for enabling workers to access information beyond the recurring set of people with whom they interact.

Emails are wonderful for providing specific context. The sender has a purpose for composing the email, and an understanding for why others would find it relevant.

Tapping this context is valuable. Whereas an employee might not scan information for a distant connection normally, in the context of an email, there is heightened interest in what others on that email may be doing. That's the moment you're looking for.

With the Connectbeam social profile integrated into Outlook, colleagues become more than a name on the email list. They have a set of activities and declared expertise and projects. Since they are on the same email with one's close conneciton, this information becomes more relevant.

By matching a wider and deeper amount of information about a person to a contextually relevant moment of considering an email, companies have a natural way to foster stronger and more diverse connections among workers.

See for Yourself

To wrap things up, you can check out the demo below which shows how Connectbeam's integration with Microsoft Outlook works (running time 4:41):

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