Socialwok Brings Facebook-like Sharing to Office 2010
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: ...