10. Social Connector

Outlook’s Social Connector does a little of everything. It displays a person’s recent activities, including email, appointments, and attachments, in a pane at the bottom of an email message or contact. If you have a Facebook or LinkedIn account and have Outlook signed into the accounts, you’ll also see updates the person posts to these social networks.

FIGURE 10.1 The People pane displays at the bottom of the Reading pane and contacts. Click the contact photos to view email and other activities between you and that person.

When a message is sent to more than one person, each person is listed in the People pane, and selecting any of the pictures or the icon representing the person displays your activities with that person: messages to or from that person, their social networking feeds (based on their social network security settings), appointments, or attachments to or from them.

If you don’t want to see the People pane, you can turn it off or minimize it. See Showing or Hiding the Social Connector Pane, later in this chapter.

To view updates from social networks in the pane, you need to configure the social providers in Outlook. Outlook 2013 includes Facebook, LinkedIn, and SharePoint providers with the default installation, and you can go online to download additional connectors (when available).

1. Switch to the View tab.

2. Expand the People pane button.

3. Select Account Settings from the menu.

4. Click to select a social network you want to use.

5. Enter your name and password (see Figure 10.2).

FIGURE 10.2 Sign in to the social networks. Outlook 2013 includes Social Connector providers for Facebook, LinkedIn, and SharePoint server.

6. Click Connect to link the social network to Outlook.

7. If you want the social network to be the default source for contact photos, select By Default, Show Photos and Information from This Network When Available.

Select the next social network and repeat the process.

If you want to remove a social network, select the network and click the X on the right to delete your username and password for the social network (see Figure 10.3).

FIGURE 10.3 To sign out of the social network, click the X. To change your account, click the white Paper icon.

If you change your username or password on the social network, you’ll need to change it in the Social Connector. Click the Paper icon to change your username and password. Click the Options button to view or change the settings Office applies to data shared between Office and the social network, which is contacts, profile photos, and status updates (see Figure 10.4)

FIGURE 10.4 Click the white Paper icon to change social network settings, including which network is the default for contact photos.

• Download Contacts from Social Network—This setting creates a contact folder in Outlook and syncs your social network connections to Outlook, if the social network allows it. Only LinkedIn allows contacts to sync, whereas Facebook does not.

• Access Social Network Update—This syncs your Facebook and LinkedIn status updates to Outlook and displays them in the People pane when you view email to or from your friend, or view their contact.

• By Default, Show Photos and Information from This Network When Available—This sets the default network for contact photos. If a contact is a Facebook friend and a LinkedIn connection, this setting controls which photo you see in Outlook.

If you use Outlook 2013 at work, the Social Connector can sync updates from Active Directory and update your local contacts with the contact’s job title, address, and phone number from the Active Directory. The Settings button is used to set the Contact update option. Users can choose to be prompted before the contacts are updated, to update without prompting, or to never update (see Figure 10.5). If your Active Directory is kept up-to-date, you’ll always have the correct job title, address, and phone numbers for your contact when automatic updates are enabled. If the Active Directory is not updated often but you keep your contacts updated, you’ll want to use Never update.

FIGURE 10.5 Control the contact update feature in the Social Connector’s Settings.

When a contact is updated from the Active Directory, a change log is added to the Contact’s Notes field. The log lists the fields that were updated and the date they were updated.

To turn contact photos off, click File, click Options, click People, and then deselect the Show User Photographs When Available option (see Figure 10.6). You must restart Outlook for this to take effect.

FIGURE 10.6 Turning off Contact photos in People Options.

FIGURE 10.7 Open and minimize the People pane using the caret on the right.

If you want to turn the People pane off, you need to use the People Pane button on the View tab.

When the pane is open, you can drag the upper edge to make the panel larger or smaller. This can be helpful when you are reviewing a list of messages in the People pane.

Just being Facebook friends with someone is not enough to ensure that their status updates or profile picture will be visible when they send you email. The email address you have for the person must be linked to the person’s Facebook account, and the correct Facebook profile privacy settings must be set (see Figure 10.8).

FIGURE 10.8 Adjust your Facebook security settings to prevent people you send email to from seeing your Facebook status in the People pane.

Following is an explanation of various privacy settings:

• Publicly Searchable—You will be able to see the person’s status in the social connector even if you are not friends.

• Not Searchable—No status information is returned from Facebook.

• Searchable to Friends Only but the person’s email address is not visible to friends—No status information is returned from Facebook even if you are a friend.

• Searchable to Friends Only AND their email address is visible to friends—That person’s status information is returned from Facebook if you are a friend.

The address associated with Facebook must be the same email address used for email (or on the contact record in Outlook), or registered as a secondary address in the Facebook Profile.

If you want your activities to appear for your colleagues at work, add your work email address as an additional email address under account settings for the social network. Or, to ensure business colleagues can’t see your Facebook posts, don’t link your business address to your Facebook account.

• Are the messages in the People pane sent with replies?

• Is my picture sent with my messages?

A surprising number of people see the search results in the People pane and are concerned that their replies will include all these messages.

No one except you sees this list of messages. The messages do not leave your computer. Other Outlook users you send email to will see a similar list, but it contains only the email in their mailbox. You’ll only see what is in your mailbox or what they have allowed on social networking sites. Others will see only what is in their mailbox or what you allow on social networking sites. You can’t “see” messages in their mailbox, even if you use Exchange server.

The Contact photo that displays on messages and in the People pane also generates a lot of questions from people worried it’s going to be sent with their email. You aren’t sending your photo with your messages; the photo you see on messages is also not sent with the message. If recipients have a contact for you and have added a photo to it, they will see that. They could also see your Facebook or LinkedIn photo, if your security settings on either site allow it.