LinkedIn is today launching its official desktop application for Windows 10, allowing the Microsoft-owned professional social networking service to be more deeply integrated into the operating system through features like the Windows 10 Start Menu, a pinnable Live Tile, and Action Center notifications. These alerts will include things like new messages in your LinkedIn inbox, updates about who’s viewed your profile, trending news stories in your industry, and other highlights, the company says.Users can configure which alerts they’d like to see from the Notifications tab inside the app, LinkedIn’s blog post notes.
At the time of the acquisition, LinkedIn had over 400 million users worldwide, which makes it the largest professional social networking site in existence. In April, the company announced it had grown to 500 million users across 200 countries around the world, which represented 10+ million active jobs, access to 9+ million companies, and more than 100,000 articles published every week. Simply put, that’s a lot of business-related information for Microsoft to tie into through this new, integrated desktop experience.
Microsoft closed on its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in December, then noting its plans to bring LinkedIn identity to Microsoft’s productivity applications, like Office and Outlook; the ability to draft resumés and apply for jobs via Microsoft Word; LinkedIn integration with Active Directory; and LinkedIn notifications in the Windows Action Center, among several other things.
This latter item is being addressed with the launch of the new Windows 10 application, which sends out its updates in real-time – a move that could make LinkedIn feel like a more active network, with timely news and information, rather than a place that many people today only think to check when they’re looking to change jobs.
LinkedIn, whose user base is 40 percent desktop users, also rolled out an update to its desktop experience on the web in January.
The new Windows 10 app is today beginning to roll out to the Windows Store, and will be available in 22 languages at launch.
The launch of the Windows 10 application comes shortly after Microsoft announced its plans to deprecate its Windows mobile app, which will be shut down on August 30, 2017. The company’s statement at the time said that Microsoft’s efforts were instead focused on building out the new LinkedIn desktop app, which would arrive this summer – as it has today. Mobile users, meanwhile, could use the site from the mobile web if they chose, said Microsoft.
The list of supported languages includes English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Arabic, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Turkish, Swedish, Chinese (traditional), Czech, Indonesian, Thai, Malay, and Romanian.
The app will be available to all LinkedIn markets by the end of the month.
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