Office 2013 Tips: Outlook Social Connector – LinkedIn

The Outlook Social Connector lets you see profiles and updates for people that send you email. The connector is available as a download for earlier versions of Outlook, but with Outlook 2013 it is included out of the box. I have found the using the Outlook Social Connector for LinkedIn to be very valuable, and it think it will be for you too. Even if you are not an avid user of LinkedIn and you don’t have many connections, this connector will pull information from anyone out there with a public profile (which is most folks). Let’s say that you get an email from a vendor or someone you met at a conference. You kind of remember talking to them, but you’re not totally sure. With the Outlook Social Connector connected to LinkedIn, now you can see their picture. And if you are like me you often forget names, but having a picture can help connect the dots. Ok, let’s take a look.

First things first. Getting the Outlook Social Connector connected.

  1. Open Outlook 2013 and click on the File menu in the top left corner.
  2. The Info tab will open by default and at the top you’ll see an Account Settings box. Click that.
  3. In the pop-up you’ll see an option for Social Network Accounts. Click that.
  4. Select LinkedIn and provide you username and password. And you’re all set!

Now that you have it connected let’s look at some of the features.

  1. The most obvious change will be the appearance of pictures for contacts that send you emails. If you open an email that the connector is able to find a LinkedIn profile for you’ll also see additional information in the bottom pane of the email message (known as the People Pane), including their recent activity on LinkedIn. If there are multiple recipients as a part of the email, you will be able to look at the other contacts also.
  2. While exploring the People Pane you’ll be able to expand it by clicking the arrow on the right hand side. This will expose addition tabs including What’s New, Mail, Attachments, and Meetings. These can all come in handy when you are trying to look back at your previous communication with the contact.
  3. There are several other places within the Outlook interface that you’ll notice the LinkedIn content (i.e. under Contacts), but the last one I will point out in the post is the users Contact Card. If you right-click the name of the contact you’ll get a set of basic information. On the lower right you’ll see a small arrow allowing you to open the Contact Card for the user. Once open you’ll notice the What’s New section that reflects the same information we saw in the What’s New section in step 2.

I hope you find this connector as valuable as I do!

For more information on what’s new in Outlook 2013 I found this site helpful: http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/outlook2013newandchanged.htm

 

Adobe Reader – To the Cloud!

adobe_reader_9_appicon

Adobe has a new version of the Reader product out, they are now on version XI.  There are a host of cool new features that you can look at here: http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/features.html

On the technical side there are new deployment options, better integration with SharePoint and Cloud Storage providers, group policy controls, and much more.  For now though, I’m going to focus in on the ability to easily sync your PDFs to the Acrobat.com (aka “The Cloud”).  These screenshots are taken from the Windows installation.

Adobe Reader XI for Windows

Here you can see the basic interface with the Sing in option for Acrobat.com on the right.
AdobeReaderXI

Next you see the Sign In interface where you can use an excising Adobe account or create a new one.
AdobeReaderXI-SignIn

Last you can see the Getting Started PDF that I’ve uploaded to my Acrobat.com cloud storage.
AdobeReaderXI-CloudFiles

 

Adobe Reader XI for Android

Now that you have your PDF’s uploaded to the cloud, you can access them on your mobile device too.  Below are screenshots of the user interface on my Android phone.

AdobeXI-Android-CloudPDFsAdobeXI-Android-UI