More details revealed about Office 2013 social networking features

Microsoft's launch of the Office 2013 preview version last week showcased a number of new features, including the new social networking options for the office suite. Microsoft goes over some of those new social features in a new post on the Office Next blog.

Users of the new version of SharePoint can check out the Newsfeed feature, which offers updates for the people that a SharePoint user is following. Microsoft's Ben Wilde writes in the blog about the new feature: "For example, I'm following my co-worker Louise and whenever she posts something, I see it here. When she follows a document, I see a notification in my Newsfeed. Because I work with Louise, I like to see what she’s doing and what she’s interested in. Similarly, if I follow a document (the draft of this blog post, for example), my Newsfeed lets me know when my collaborators have made any changes or whether it’s been shared with additional people for review."

Office 2013 also allows users to follow updates in specific documents and sites, along with recommendations to follow other documents and sites via the Enterprise Search engine. Microsoft also integrated the Outlook Social Connector in Office 2013 which lets users connect to third party social networks such as Facebook with no need to download additional files.

Office 2013 also lets users find experts to solve particular problems. Wilde writes: "When I search for a person in Outlook, the results are automatically ranked based on how closely I work with each person on the list. When I search for an expert in SharePoint, it will return the best matches based on people’s areas of expertise. Plus, with SharePoint’s “fuzzy matching” search, I don’t even need to spell their name right to see them show up in my results!"