Angela posted an overview of the Outlook Social Connector yesterday. In addition to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Myspace providers, you’ll also be able to write your own. And the best part, which I don’t think we’ve announced before, is that we’ll be shipping the OSC as an add-in for Outlook 2007 and 2003, so you can get all that social goodness even if you’re not yet on Outlook 2010!
My team will be providing support for developers writing these providers. We’re very much looking forward to supporting this new platform.
I just read the overview and it looks pretty good. Do you think these connectors will slow down outlooks performance too much?
They could, if they're not coded carefully. This is why we highly recommend a solution that caches information locally and refreshes asynchronously. The sample providers won't do this because they're just demonstrating the API, but from what I understand, the providers that we will be shipping do cache locally.