Ahead of the recent Microsoft acquisition of the professional social network, LinkedIn is preparing to release some important updates to its product. The update consists of a whole new design, and guess what? It looks much better now.

The news feed has also been improved, but what's probably most important about this update is the added Messenger bots. This shouldn't come as a surprise since Microsoft is one of the companies known for adding bots to its products.

We like the new design for the app, used via the web browser, because it shares several similarities to the design of the mobile app. We are quite surprised the company took so long to fix this obvious disparity. Because of this, the desktop design is now less cluttered and more pleasing to the eyes.

LinkedIn also plans to add a scheduler bot that can check online calendars automatically from other providers on the web. This happens when two users are messaging each other. We haven't tested it yet, but it sounds cool from our point of view.

The company also unveiled a new product known as LinkedIn Learning. What is LinkedIn Learning? Well, it brings to the table over 9,000 courses for folks to gain new education via the web. This is made possible with LinkedIn's acquisition of Lynda.com.

This is a big deal for the company because employers can select courses for their employees via the social network, or even recommend courses as well. Employers will even have the ability to look at what an employee is studying for reference or for any other matter.

It's clear LinkedIn is pushing the network to be more professional, yet more social at the same time. It's a win-win situation, and with the help of Microsoft, things can only get better.

It should be noted that LinkedIn Learning will require a premium account. The company also plans to release an enterprise tier in the future, but it hasn't given out much information on that or when it will become available.

As it stands right now, LinkedIn has a long way to go before any of these features become a must-use. In terms of messaging, well, the company is no Facebook with its over 400 million users. It's not a place where people go to chat, but one can hope these changes will bring forth a shift.

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. The idea here is to use LinkedIn's social connections among other things to boost its products.