Do Not Try This At Home: Outlook Social Connector

by Chris Sullivan

It’s not that I’m a professional beta tester and you’re not. It’s that the Outlook Social Connector plug-in utterly and irrevocably destroyed Outlook 2010 Beta on my laptop. As a long-time user of Microsoft products, I know how to repair, reboot, uninstall, reinstall, and all of the other quaint hobbies I’ve become accustomed to since working with Windows 3.1. And indeed, I had to reinstall Office 2010 Beta to get Outlook to function again. So my warning–Do Not Try This At Home–is just so you avoid that headache yourself. However, even without the plug-in actually working, I can see most of the functionality it is intended to provide, and I’m scared by this new push from Microsoft to bring social media directly to my inbox–I don’t necessarily want my professional life to intersect with my personal life.

Google has already experienced the unintended consequences of crossing public/private lines when they dropped Buzz into Gmail and made the assumption that an email contact is the same as a social contact. Ouch. But Microsoft is taking a different approach; they’re not pushing their own micro-blogging product. Known to be early and heavy users of Facebook, the company has decided to partner with the leading social media networks instead. Already LinkedIn, FaceBook, and MySpace are on the list, and I’m sure we can expect more to appear by the time Office 2010 is officially released.

LinkedIn…I get that. A professional networking site seems appropriate for business users. Virtually my entire list of LinkedIn contacts is comprised of colleagues, partners, employees, and bosses–both current and former. I’m also linked in with certain network hubs (those folks with the big and always yellow 500+ next to their name), key people in the industries I follow, and a few friends who happen to work in similar fields or have similar interests. Here’s the point: I don’t mind seeing and being seen in Outlook by these folks. I don’t mind being contacted for business purposes by them. And I don’t mind them have steady access to business-related information about me. All perfectly fine. LinkedIn has proven to be of value to my professional world on a few occasions, and I welcome that partnership.

But Facebook? That’s a different situation for me. I don’t friend business contacts on Facebook, and I try (as in, manually override the default settings each time a new iteration is released…grrrr) to restrict my photos, notes, comments, and other activities on that site just to the folks I’ve selected. Why? Because I don’t really want my professional contacts to see videos of my children, comments from my mother and siblings, photos of me in Middle School (especially that), or the status updates I post during a bout of insomnia. I tried creating a second Facebook profile–one that I would use just for work-related content–but my friends and family all started adding it as well. Fortunately for me, I never got into MySpace, so it poses no worries.

On the flipside, I try not to bring my personal life in to work too much. For example, I use Twitter strictly for a professional audience, and I don’t Tweet about what I ate for breakfast. Until I actually started using Twitter I didn’t believe people actually did that. I heard jokes about it, but I didn’t believe it was true. In fact, quite a few people do. And much more mundane and uninteresting details that flow through the twittosphere round the clock. Thoughtless updates are like those rose-in-bloom-under-a-pretty-rainbow animated GIF email signatures all of us used to endure, and hopefully they’ll also fade with time.

My Outlook inbox is already so bloated that I have to create archived PST files about once a quarter. When I travel, I have to work nights and weekends to catch up on email. When I vacation, I bring my laptop and smartphone to stay caught up. All this to say I don’ t need more unnecessary information in my inbox. Microsoft’s position on your privacy with these integrations is this: “if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy.” Prepare for the embarrassing deluge of unintended public access among your business contacts. This could get ugly. I love the idea of integrating LinkedIn with Outlook, but please, Microsoft, keep the breakfast burritos and sausage links out of my work life.

Oh, and if you still want to Try This At Home, Microsoft has posted a workaround for the Outlook Social Connector. It’s just a couple of uninstalls and reinstalls, plus one reboot. Nothing a seasoned Window’s users can’t handle.