Cortana in Windows 10 now shows you contact information from LinkedIn

Microsoft and LinkedIn today announced a new integration that means Cortana in Windows 10 can leverage data from the “professional social network.” In short, when Cortana gives you meeting reminders, she can now present you LinkedIn information about the attendees.

More specifically, Cortana currently taps into the Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 10 to give you meeting reminders. Those reminders can now include information such as everyone’s photo, job role, company, a link to their LinkedIn profile, and the ability to connect on LinkedIn directly.

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To take advantage of the feature, you’ll need to connect your LinkedIn account to Cortana (Notebook => Connected Accounts):

That’s it. Your next reminder from Cortana about an upcoming meeting will include available LinkedIn information about the people you are about to meet:

But it still takes quite a few clicks before you can actually see some useful information:

This feature is the right idea for business users, though the execution is questionable. It’s difficult to see why users would want to click three times just to go to someone’s LinkedIn profile.

To be completely honest, simply hyperlinking their names would probably be a smarter move. As LinkedIn puts it: “If you want to dig in more, with one click you can see their full LinkedIn profile to find who you know in common or where they went to school, so you can start the meeting with something other than the weather.”

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However, visiting LinkedIn means you’ll be letting the person know you viewed their profile right before a meeting. Which leads me to an obvious conclusion: Why can’t this feature simply let me hover over a person’s name and get their LinkedIn information?

And yes, many people find LinkedIn to be completely useless. But this is for those who still rely on it — we think Microsoft and LinkedIn can give them a better experience than this first attempt.