The VAR Guy

Socialwok has built its business on providing a social networking layer to productivity apps. Previously, their product had only been available for Google Apps, but today marks the availability of the Socialwok Outlook Connector, letting business users of Microsoft’s e-mail client keep track of what their coworkers are up to, Web 2.0-style. Here’s the scoop.

We’ve covered Socialwok’s product here, so I won’t get into too much detail. But the basic idea is that their namesake solution provides a Facebook-style running feed of shared documents, status updates, links, calendar appointments, RSS items, and other shareables for Google Apps domains. It can even scrape Twitter and Facebook for posts to appear in the main crawl.

While connecting Outlook to Socialwok is still in beta and doesn’t have all that functionality, it has the same basic idea at its core, and offers some productivity-enhancing tools to offer end-users that make it worth a look.

The main attraction for potential users, according to a Socialwok blog post, is that their product gives users a view of all your previous contact with the person on the other end of the e-mail. All their status updates, all the documents they’ve shared, all their correspondence with you, and even their profile picture, are quickly and easily visible.

Socialwok also offers contact integration with Outlook, such that Socialwok contacts appear in a separate folder, with their most current information constantly updated. Just start typing their name in the “To:” field of an e-mail and Socialwok says it does the rest.

I was impressed with Socialwok’s tight Gmail integration. If the Singapore-headquartered company can bring the same level of functionality and access to Microsoft’s product line, the Outlook Social Connector – which it requires to run – may have justified its existence in one fell swoop.

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