Achieve more through people with LinkedIn and Microsoft 365
Published Sep 25 2018 06:00 AM 20.9K Views

An organization's most important assets are its people. We’re announcing two new ways to use the power of the LinkedIn network within your daily workflow, building on last year’s announcement of the ability to see LinkedIn profile information in Outlook on the Web, OneDrive, and SharePoint in Office 365. These new experiences, powered by LinkedIn, enhance the way you collaborate and build relationships by providing contextual insights and contact information for the people you're working with, inside and outside your organization.

How often do you get an email or walk into a meeting not knowing much about the people you’re about to collaborate with? Now, you can simply hover over a contact's name to see information from their LinkedIn Profile, such as where they work, what they do, and where they went to school.

Whether it’s a colleague, customer or partner, these details help you better understand who that person is so you can start off on the right foot and collaborate effectively, even when outside your organization. But our vision is to help you deepen existing relationships as well, helping you discover new things about the people you work with every day.

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Soon, whether you have met previously or work together every day, you will also soon be able to see LinkedIn information directly in meeting invites, so you can walk into the meeting with important highlights about attendees, from when you last worked together to their work anniversaries.

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And you will be able to coauthor documents with many of your first-degree LinkedIn connections in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and send emails to them directly from Outlook, without needing to have their email addresses stored in your contacts. This brings your corporate directory and your LinkedIn network together, so you never lose touch with the contacts who can help you succeed, inside or outside your organization. And you no longer need to worry about losing touch with important contacts.

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Of course, all of that is made possible by securely connecting your LinkedIn account with your Microsoft account. Connecting your accounts shares basic info – such as your profile, your contacts, and your calendar – to improve your daily experience both with LinkedIn and Office 365. We respect your privacy and honor the settings you chose, including who can see your email address.

To get started, simply open a person’s Profile Card and click on the LinkedIn match. On the screen, if you have never done this before, it will first let you know that your organization is providing you with the power of LinkedIn. From there, a small LinkedIn window will pop-up where you can sign-in and consent for Microsoft applications to retrieve LinkedIn data on your behalf.  Next, consent for LinkedIn to access some of your Microsoft application data to complete the picture. Now, you’re then ready to view useful information about people you’re interacting with, within LinkedIn and in your Office applications.

LinkedIn integration in the Office web apps will gradually start rolling out in the coming months for Office 365 users and to Outlook on the web users who have opted in to the new Outlook on the web, and world-wide availability will come in 2019. We are exploring the opportunity to bring these new capabilities to other platforms, and we are excited to continue bringing more intelligent experiences to users soon based on your feedback. 

You’ll only see LinkedIn information if you or your organization have received an update that includes these capabilities and if you have connected your Microsoft 365 account with LinkedIn. These features are being introduced gradually, so the features you see may differ from what has been announced.

 

 

15 Comments
Brass Contributor

Sorry to cause rain on the parade here but the 2017 (!) announcement of LInkedIn integration to Outlook is still not deployed which makes me think that we will not see this additional features until 2020 something... We have the LinkedIn to Outlook integration for our targeted release users but not for the rest. Have a hard time explaining to users why it takes so long. Any info on that? Would appreciate it!

Thanks!

P.S. The above mentioned features are of course awesome! Really looking forward to them! D.S. 

Jacob

Microsoft

Hi Jacob, great you like the experience in Targeted Release. We are slowly ramping up beyond Targeted Release and expect to do so for web end points until early 2019.  During our first phases in Targeted Release we've received some really good feedback and we've been working hard to improve those hence why see you a thoughtful and staged rolled out. Cheers.

Brass Contributor

Just wondering how we can disable this feature from the start (before it gets "enabled" by Microsoft).  Not only do I not want our users to use this feature, I do not want it to be visible in outlook or anywhere in O365.

 

Copper Contributor
I was wondering the same. How can you disable this feature in case we do need to?

 

If you do not want your users to be able to link their Office 365 and LinkedIn accounts, you can disable this by following the instructions here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/linkedin-integration

Copper Contributor

is it just going to be Outlook on the Web we use desktop version.

Also how do i know its been roled out for me? 

Microsoft

We are currently ramping to OWA Web. Desktop and Mobile will follow once we finish Web ramps. 

Once the feature is enabled for your tenant you'll be able to see the tenant admin control, more here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/linkedin-integration

 

Regarding the sharing feature:

New feature: Share and coauthor documents with LinkedIn connections
MC175683 Stay Informed Published On : March 12, 2019

 

If this is enabled, and I have a 1st degree connection with my boss, when I try to share a document from OneDrive and I start to type my boss' name - do I get one result (the internal Office 365 identity) or two results (Office 365 and LinkedIn)?

Iron Contributor

Allowing LinkedIn integration and letting users co-author documents with LinkedIn users are completely different things, and should have separate settings, not a one setting that rules them all.

 

If it's an all or nothing scenario, we will need to turn off LinkedIn integration for our company.

Microsoft

Hi Kevin,

 

We show two results, with the Office 365 one first, unless the person is listing the Office 365 identity (email address) in her/his LinkedIn profile. In such a case, we only show one result because the second, the one coming from LinkedIn, will be a duplicate.

Microsoft

Hi Lynn,

 

Thanks for providing this feedback. There are separate admin controls for document Sharing and for LinkedIn integration. However, I believe, you are asking for granular control over the different features under the LinkedIn integration umbrella. This is good input.  Thanks. 

Iron Contributor

Hi Issa,

 

[Edited]

 

Let me first start by saying I'm a fan of integration, but there needs to be some serious consideration put into how malicious third party actors can game the functionality to create an even larger security issue. Here is the issue; without granular control over the functionality, there are serious issues concerning malicious third party actors spoofing and/or becoming a first degree contact.

 

LinkedIn is a social media site for business, and I see the benefits of allowing more interaction, but integrating document sharing in Microsoft apps will create a perception of legitimacy for a public security zone. In essence you are creating a "federation lite" with LinkedIn and 365 tenants, and in doing so, our security posture just became significantly more complex.

 

Social engineering from LinkedIn profiles will become even more common place, as you now have a entire database of users, that if you just become a first degree contact with, you have the default capability to work on documents with. While nothing stops a third party actor from sharing malicious files with users now, it is all done through email, which is hard enough to convince users to be wary of in the first place. Integrating notifications, such as "Bob or Susan wants to share and work on this document with you" in an application, from a service from LinkedIn, is just going to compound that issue, as again you have now created the perception that LinkedIn interactions are legitimate.

 

All it will take is for one malicious actor to upload/modify a specially configured macro enabled workbook to create havoc. Onedrive doesn't do security scanning of documents, it will allow a macro enabled document to be uploaded, and with the new chat features, it would be EXTREMELY easy to convince someone to just open the workbook on their desktop version of Excel and enable the macro to run.

 

That is just one scenario, there are thousands more.

 

All of this is just from 5 minutes of thinking about the security issues that this type of integration can create.

 

Granular control is a must, and if it's not available during the initial rollout, as stated, we will need to disable LinkedIn integration with our Tenant.

Brass Contributor

Yeah guys, this is not on.  I have to agree Lynn here. This is a governance nightmare!  The ability to connect to people from SharePoint, sure, works well, I like it.  But sharing documents to those people?  Hell no.  I don't even know 80% of the people who are connected to me on LinkedIn, but at least I am social network savvy enough to know to watch my step.  The average office user doesn't know that.  This needs to be addressed urgently.  We need to be able to switch off social network document sharing.

Steel Contributor

This is a security train wreck waiting to happen. Most people I know are WAY less picky about who they connect with on LinkedIn than they are on Facebook or even Twitter. This is an insane risk for any company to take. 

Microsoft

Thanks Lynn for the detailed feedback. And thanks Veronique and Rachel for the added context. At this time, it is one admin control to turn all LinkedIn integration “on” or “off” (via the link provided above by Rebecca). The Admin can enable at group level for different groups of employees. This is the current level of granular control. Depending on role, some groups benefit from external sharing and collaboration - using the company tools. If enabled at admin level, employees have to opt in and connect accounts before the features are enabled. Having said all this, we hear your feedback and will take it into deep consideration.

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