Microsoft has taken a cue from Facebook and introduced social features to Office 365, its online productivity suite.
The new features are underpinned by what corporate vice-president Jeff Teper described as the "Office Graph", which connects a user's identity and contacts between Lync, Outlook and other Office 365 apps.
Like Facebook's Graph, the idea is to build on Microsoft's $1 billion purchase of business social service Yammer and turn Office 365 into a more useful network.
One major new feature running on Office Graph is "Oslo", a Facebook-style news feed which shows a user's upcoming meetings, contacts, recent documents and other useful information.
"The Oslo application surfaces what might be most relevant for each individual based on what they’re already doing in Exchange, Outlook, SharePoint, Office, Lync, and Yammer," explained Teper.
Users can filter information displayed by Oslo through categories such as "shared with me" or "modified by me". They can also look at social media-style profiles of their contacts, which includes information such as mutual colleagues and contacts or recent documents.
Microsoft is weaving the Yammer experience into Office 365 more widely, adding the social networking tool's conversations feature into SharePoint Online and OneDrive.
Another major new feature is groups, a way to bundle contacts and documents for a single project into one place. Each new group gets its own inbox, social feed, calendar and document library accessible to each member.
Microsoft also launched the Office 365 SDK for Windows 8 and Android developers, making it easier for developers to use Office 365 data in their own apps. It will update its existing Office 365 APIs for PowerPoint and Outlook.
The company didn't say whether Oslo would be available to all Office 365 subscribers or if it might cost extra, but said the new features would roll out through the year.
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