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LinkedIn for Outlook Social Connector Discontinued

Written by

Adam Fowler

in

Today I received the following notice from LinkedIn:

Hi Adam,

As an active user of LinkedIn for Microsoft Outlook Social Connector, we wanted to make sure we let you know that on March 9, we will no longer support LinkedIn for Microsoft Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010. This means that LinkedIn information about your email contacts will not be visible in those Outlook versions.
Our team is working with Microsoft to build even more powerful tools to help you stay connected with your professional world. Until then you can get similar capabilities with the “LinkedIn for Outlook” app for Outlook 2013 from the Office Store.
Have questions? Visit our Help Center for more information..
Thanks,
The LinkedIn Team

That’s 6 days notice (although probably seven since I’m going to assume it’s US March 9) for discontinuing a product. I’ve had a brief look around and can’t find any other information around this, apart from a similar message on LinkedIn’s website.

LinkedIn appear to be pushing their new app called LinkedIn for Outlook, which is only supported by Outlook 2013 or Outlook Online. That doesn’t help those of us that can’t run Outlook 2013 for legacy reasons (plugins being the main culprit here!).

One note is worth pointing out on the decomissing of the product taken from LinkedIn’s website:

  • Any contact information that you have locally synced in Outlook will remain in Outlook, but it will no longer be updated.

Does this mean the plugin will continue without erroring, showing cached information? This can be a gotcha for people running it either at home, or in a corporate environment. I’ve reached out to LinkedIn on Twitter, so we’ll see if they respond:

 

Quick Update: Wes Miller has pointed out that this could be due to LinkedIn API changes, locking down most things.

Update 11th March 2015 – I’ve had LinkedIn help respond. Looks like it’s time to uninstall that addon before users are affected!

Comments

7 responses to “LinkedIn for Outlook Social Connector Discontinued”

  1. Vladislav

    This sucks. Its not some social facebook-style app we are using. Some corporations cannot move to latest Outlook\Office versions. Why do they drop the support ‘so soon’ on corporate software lifetime? Outoolk 2010 is still widely used. Sad…

    Reply
    1. Adam Fowler

      Agree, they’ve just lost a huge chunk of corporate Outlook 2010 users’s extra usage of LinkedIn. Strange decision.

      Reply
  2. Peter

    And what’s more, even if you have Outlook 2013, the App reviews are not good. I would not touch it.

    Who stops and thinks, I know, let’s take a part of our business model that’s working well for our corporate clients, and ditch it?

    For me, my information hub is on Outlook 2010. I don’t particularly care for the metro look of Outlook 2013 so I am in no hurry to upgrade. What that means, as a corporate IT user and Managing Consultant for my organisation, is that LinkedIn is something I’ll be using a lot less.

    Maybe they should change their name, LinkedOut might be more appropriate!

    Reply
  3. sjamie

    Wow! I was wondering why I kept receiving “cannot log in” messages. This is a very bad move.

    Reply
  4. SeanS

    I think this was a premature move at best by LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional, corporate app, and Outlook 2010 is still the dominant email client in many companies. It was not communicated to customers well (read: at all). And the Social Connector is still available to download from their site (https://www.linkedin.com/static?key=microsoft_outlook). Why? Unprofessional all the way around.

    Reply
    1. Adam Fowler

      Agree, there must be other reasons for this behind the scenes.

      Reply
  5. FKojiteje

    One quite stupid decision. I cannot find more pleasant term and cannot understand the reason.

    Reply

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