Microsoft starts rolling out LinkedIn integration with Outlook.com

Microsoft on Wednesday announced rolling out integration of LinkedIn with Outlook.com for Office 365 consumers. The company also announced releasing Office 365 in 96 new global markets, bringing the software to over 246 markets worldwide in 44 languages.

With LinkedIn integration, Outlook.com users can view insights, profile pictures, work history and more from within their inbox. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had previewed the integration of LinkedIn profiles in Outlook.com at the company's annual conference for developers and IT professionals "Ignite" in September.

In June last year, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash.

According to a blog post by Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President, Office team, people even in Antarctica and the Republic of Congo can now enjoy the benefits of Office 365's new apps and features to help organisations of all sizes accelerate digital transformation.

"We continued to improve the intelligent services in Office 365 with a new set of cloud-powered features designed to save you time and produce better results," Koenigsbauer said late on Tuesday. The company revamped the translation tools available within 'Word' giving users power to translate sections of text, or the entire document, and review or save the result as a regular document file.

'Translator' supports 60 languages, including 11 that use neural machine translation. Microsoft made it easier to access the information needed while working in 'Word', 'Excel' and 'PowerPoint'.

Office 365 commercial subscribers can now search across their organisation, share current files with colleagues and preview and re-use slides, graphs and tables from previous documents with support for people and document search in "Tell Me".

Word on iPad now supports 'Immersive Reader' and 'Read Aloud', new mobile tools that enable content to be viewed in optimised ways. Apart from other Cloud enhancements that make file management easier via OneDrive and SharePoint, Microsoft also expanded its online toolkit.