Microsoft Office Continues Its Dynasty into 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 was released in its beta form in October of 2009 according to Channel Web. This article also outlines some of the newer members of the Microsoft Office family. Most notably the branch targeted toward social networking. Microsoft Outlook Social Connector is almost like an add on for Microsoft outlook that allows third party social networking feeds to show up in Outlook.

The fact that this feature will not only incorporate business feeds but social networking feeds is very interesting to me from a business perspective. I mean, are companies really going to want their employees Outlook inbox to include status updates from Twitter and Facebook? Granted, these tools do have new found corporate and commercial use through advertising, publicity, and point of sale pages. However, their original design was to link people together. Perhaps the problem will no longer be employees hanging around the break room chatting for too long. They can do it surreptitiously while checking email and gossiping at the same time. It will be interesting to see how this new tool will affect commercial productivity in the future.