My Love Affair with LinkedIn: The Outlook Toolbar and the Dashboard
LinkedIn has two toolbars that are musts; one for browsers (I use IE), and one for Outlook. It's the Outlook Toolbar that really rocks. When you install it, you can do quite a few things to see who you email with that you should consider inviting to connect on linked in.
But what really rocks my world is the dashboard. You can set it to be the opening view of Outlook. Here's what it offers; two columns of information, one on Contacts, and one on Communication.
In the contacts you have the following choices:And under Communications:
It's not perfect, but it's really easy to close out the items that you don't feel relevant. As a hyper-organized person, the idea of being able to have more comprehensive contact information is invaluable. This makes it easier for me to consolidate addresses and titles. You can do a simple "update" or "update and cancel" or just leave it alone. What really cool about doing the update, is that it puts a note in the notes field of the contact with a time stamp indicating what changed. How cool is that?!
I think it's pretty darned close to making your networking life easier without actually doing a mind mild with you. And if you're like me, that's probably a really good thing.
Now if LinkedIn would work on showing users the pretty pictures in their FAQs, more people would use them. I'll try to post some a little later.





Comments