While we have covered the social media aspects of LinkedIn in the past, the service is now being extended with third-party applications. Right now, Box.net Files and Huddle WorkSpaces enable you to use LinkedIn as an online document collaboration platform. These free tools are light versions of more full-featured products, but should serve you just fine for one-off collaboration needs.

The potential of LinkedIn for document collaboration may sound hinky to some, but there are some real benefits, including:

* Secure access via the LinkedIn social network of contacts.
* No infrastructure or administrative costs.
* Access documents anywhere via the web, as long as you are a LinkedIn member.

However, there is a flip side, in that that there are basically two types of LinkedIn users — those who log in faithfully on a regular basis, and those who log in just often enough to respond to network invites, and otherwise spend little time on the site. Online document collaboration via LinkedIn is going to work best for organizations where LinkedIn is already part of the corporate culture. In other words, frequent LinkedIn users are going to be the best adopters of these applications.

Both of these applications are accessible from your LinkedIn profile, via the “Featured Applications” section. Read more…

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