Source: www.itnews.com
Now
that Microsoft’s massive $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn has officially
closed, it’s time for the next step: figuring out how its massive
store of business information can best be used by Microsoft and its
customers.
Building
upon the company’s integration
plan outlined earlier this year, Microsoft chief executive
Satya Nadella laid out a set of plans for short-term integration with LinkedIn
(in a blog
post on LinkedIn, natch), with advantages for both consumers
and business customers.
Perhaps
the most interesting will be closer ties between resume functions in Word and
in LinkedIn, so that users drafting resumes in Word will be able to update
their LinkedIn profiles automatically. Nadella suggests that LinkedIn
updates will propagate through Windows 10’s Action Center, and that your
LinkedIn identity will be used in Outlook and in Office.
Business
customers will be able to benefit from LinkedIn Learning online education,
available as a feature of the paid Office 365 subscription. LinkedIn Lookup—a
competitor of sorts to Microsoft’s
Delve, which aggregates information about your colleagues and
contacts—will be integrated into Office 365, Nadella wrote. LinkedIn’s Sales
Navigator will be tied to Dynamics 365, as an aid to what Nadella called
“social selling” to customers.
Why
this matters: Microsoft clearly bought LinkedIn with the goal of adding
to its store of digital intelligence, specifically business intelligence. Some
of that will bubble up fairly quickly to consumers, such as the Word-LinkedIn
integration. But the deeper, more powerful goals involve analyzing business
trends and providing Office 365 subscribers the knowledge they need to get
their jobs done. That’s more difficult to achieve and measure, but will
probably be the true test of whether that $26 billion was worth it in the
end.
This
story, "Microsoft's vision for LinkedIn is about tying its business data
into Office and other services" was originally published by PCWorld.