With Microsoft Office 2010 officially launching this week, everyone here at Microsoft HQ in Singapore has reason to be excited. According to Forrester Research, 81% of surveyed enterprises are running Office 2007 today with at least a third of the respondents already planning to upgrade to Office 2010 within the next 12 months.
The enthusiasm from customers is understandable, since Office 2010 is more than just an evolutionary update, but includes revolutionary new features such as Office Web Apps and the new Outlook Social Connector.
At the Microsoft Innovation Centre, we are particularly excited about the Outlook Social Connector feature, because not only has it been useful to us by bringing social networking functionality (from services like LinkedIn) into Outlook 2010, but it also offers an opportunity for our partners to extend the functionality of Outlook 2010 to other online services as well.
And one of our Singapore-based BizSpark startups has done just that.
Socialwok describes itself as a service which “was created to allow organizations to harness the ease and power of rich media and feeds to improve collaboration and communication.” Winners of the TechCrunch 2009 Demopit Award, Socialwok provides a Facebook-like collaboration and sharing service for both enterprises and SMBs. And with Socialwok’s new (beta) Outlook Social Connector that they released today, Office customers can also now tap into the Socialwok service right from within Outlook 2010 (it works in Outlook 2003 and 2007 as well).
Interestingly, Socialwok started out its life as a service specifically designed with Google Apps integration in mind, and even today, it’s running on Google App Engine. However, the Socialwok service today doesn’t require you to be using Google Apps or have a Google ID in order to use their service.
Ming Yong, Socialwok CEO describes his commitment to the Microsoft platform:
There are many small medium businesses on the Microsoft Office platform already using Microsoft Outlook for everyday messaging. As such, it is a logical choice for us to integrate with Microsoft Outlook 2010 especially since this version of Outlook includes native support for social networking. We are excited about bringing business social sharing and collaboration to Outlook.
This Socialwok Outlook Social Connector for Microsoft Outlook marks only the very first step in what we plan to do with the Microsoft Office platform both on the desktop as well as in the cloud. Microsoft Office 2010 also includes the release of Microsoft Office Web Apps. We see Microsoft becoming a dominant player in the cloud based Office Productivity space. By working closely with Microsoft, my company aims to realize our vision of being the largest business social collaboration network for cloud based office productivity in the world.
Ming Yong also describes his experience being a startup in the BizSpark program, and how it benefitted them throughout the process of building their Outlook Social Connector:
Socialwok has benefited tremendously from being a startup in the BizSpark program. We got advice from the evangelists at Microsoft Innovation Centre Singapore on building the Outlook Social Connector. We also got lots of guidance in helping us understand where and how Socialwok can fit into the rest of the Microsoft platform. The Microsoft Innovation Centre helped us to connect us with the various product teams at Redmond to explore future collaborations. As a BizSpark startup, we got free access to all of the Microsoft development tools and applications we needed. I would say that we would definitely not been able to come so far without the great assistance and guidance from the guys at the Microsoft Innovation Centre.
At the Microsoft Innovation Centre here in Singapore, we are always happy to support our partner ecosystem and help them become successful. We are very happy to see a Singapore-based startup like Socialwok achieve the success it has to date (10k+ companies and tens of thousands of users), and we look forward to continue working with them to integrate their service with the rest of the Microsoft platform.
Download and try out the Socialwok Outlook Social Connector today!
(If you are using Office 2010 RTM, you already have the Outlook Social Connector functionality installed and you only need to install the Socialwok provider at the link above. If you are using Office 2003 or 2007, you will need to download and install the Office Social Connector here.)
Check out some of the screenshots below:
And lastly, here is the press release.
UPDATE: TechCrunch has also picked up this story and here is a video demo of the Socialwok Outlook Social Connector in action.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8DpIkJxIfM[/youtube]
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