As I've covered in my two earlier posts I've been investing a little time to figure out how to make LinkedIn work for me. This time I wanted to talk about some extra tools they provide that you may find useful.

One that I mentioned previously but didn't link to was the Contact Finder, an ActiveX control that you download and then allows you to select contacts from your Outlook contact list to send invitations out. It worked perfectly and quickly, and I highly recommend this as a first step in participating in LinkedIn. Do note that it doesn't automatically grab all the contacts, you can review/select the ones you want to send.

In addition, they offer an Outlook toolbar and a browser toolbar (IE and Firefox). I use Outlook and opted to try that one. Fairly easy install, but it would not connect to LinkedIn, kept insisting my credentials were wrong. Verified credentials, turned off my firewall, uninstalled/reinstalled, same thing. Google search didn't return anything helpful, so I set a request to customer support. The next day I got this back (which worked):

Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. After careful investigation, we have found that the new Outlook Toolbar contains an incompatibility error with some of our users. We are now working to resolve this error. In the meantime, we have two suggestions which will help you in resolving the error:

1. We recommend that some of our members remove their current version of the Toolbar and download an older version of the Toolbar.
To remove your current version of the Outlook Toolbar in Windows XP:
1. Click “Start” in Windows
2. Go to “Control Panel”
3. Click “Add or Remove Programs”
4. Scroll to the “LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar” and click “Uninstall”
In Windows Vista:
1. Open “Control Panel”
2. Click “Programs”
3. Click “Programs and Features”
4. Find “LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar” and choose to remove.

The older version is available for download here:
http://download.linkedin.com/desktop/outlook/en/2.5.1.1606/bin/LinkedInToolbarOLInstaller.exe

As far as features, I'll let you browse the list, but I found 2 useful and one interesting. The first is that if you open an email and the sender is on your list, on the far right there is an 'info' button that brings up a quick LinkedIn snapshot of the person. Worked pretty well, didn't detect that a sender was set up via one email and sent the message using a different one (maybe if I had both in my contact list, didn't try). The second - and overall most useful - is that it scan any/all of your folders to pick up your total set of contacts and distinguish between those in your contact list and those that aren't. From there you can send LI invitations which worked, mostly. I sent out about 5 to test, and a day later I'm still getting an error that some were not formatted correctly and can't be sent - not sure yet how to kill those off. The last feature - the interesting one - is a dashboard that combines information from LI with information from your email to give you a list of invites you to need to finish, email that needs a reply, etc. The overall impression was absolutely a v2 - interesting start, but not fully baked and it feels (to me mind you) that it's not of the same quality as the LI web site. It didn't hurt performance that I could see, and if you fully commit to LI it's worth looking at.