Last year, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, but even though the acquisition has long closed, Microsoft hasn’t yet done much with all of the data it gets from the social network. At its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, the company announced some first steps in integrating LinkedIn’s social graph with its Office products.

Now don’t get too excited yet. What we’re talking about here is the integration of LinkedIn data with Office 365 profile cards. So assuming you don’t know much about your professional contacts and colleagues yet, you can now see more information about them right in Office 365 without having to go to their LinkedIn profiles (and potentially showing up as that one person who looked at their LinkedIn profile that week, which will surely trigger yet another LinkedIn email for them).

"There are two components to LinkedIn that Microsoft wanted," said Jenny Sussin, a Gartner research director, in an interview. "One is the data component, the other is the algorithm component."

"There were two algorithms [Microsoft] wanted," she asserted. "No. 1 was the algorithm that creates the connection graph, the social networking graph. No. 2 was the algorithm that determines the information most valuable and most actionable to you."

If Microsoft can integrate those technologies into its existing products -- Yammer, for one, a $1.2 billion acquisition, and its Office 365 suite as well -- and thus transfer LinkedIn's now-public relevance to companies' internal networks, it could justify the new investment.

"If your company can help surface the information most important to your job, that could increase productivity," said Sussin.

1. There is real synergy between the companies and their products, particularly Microsoft’s Office productivity suite—now delivered primarily online—and LinkedIn’s core database of more than 400 million mostly professional profiles.
2. Access to LinkedIn users, as well as the enormous amounts of data they throw off, could yield insights and products within Microsoft that allow it to monetize its investment in LinkedIn in ways that the professional networking site might not be able to.
3. LinkedIn also could supercharge Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, used to identify and track sales leads. Microsoft is in fourth place in market share among the large CRM players, including Salesforce.com Inc., SAP SE and Oracle Corp.

• Target ads with greater accuracy and granularity. 
• Sell career advice based on the world’s largest employment database. 
• Validate credentials. 
• Help employers find just the right person. 
• Create a LinkedInstitute. 
• Create more data products. 
• Make premium memberships more valuable to consumers. 

LinkedIn’s value: On February 2, the company’s stock was trading at $203 per share. Then LinkedIn provided an outlook for the full year that fell well short of Wall Street’s expectations. Investors shaved an epic 40 percent of the stock price in one day.

LinkedIn’s business: Beyond the question of fair value, there is the company’s underlying business to consider. The reason investors freaked out was because ad growth was slowing, and so was U.S. job growth.

Microsoft’s track record: If I’m a consumer, or a business, it seems tough to imagine how this jumble fits together into a cohesive whole. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t really know either. 

Acquisition double-talk, part 1: There’s a lot of talk today about how this is going to broaden Microsoft’s reach into all sorts of new channels for selling stuff like cloud services. But does one of the largest tech companies in the world really need to spend $26 billion to reach new customers?

Acquisition double talk, part 2: We will all work together. But we will work together while remaining separate. We call it: Separate Togetherness. In any case, one can already imagine the turf wars!

Microsoft has made a big bet on LinkedIn, announcing Monday that it will spend nearly $26.2 billion in cash to purchase the enterprise-focused social networking and recruiting company.

The acquisition -- which is the largest in Microsoft's history and one of the biggest tech acquisitions ever -- will combine the world's largest enterprise-focused social network with one of the biggest enterprise software companies.

It's more than just a social play, though. In addition to LinkedIn's core professional networking product, Microsoft also gains access to products including presentation- sharing software SlideShare and professional training service Lynda.com.