Microsoft Corp. (NASD: MSFT) completed its $26 billion acquisition of online networking company LinkedIn Corp. (NYSE: LNKD) on 8 December. Microsoft first announced the deal with LinkedIn in June and the European Union gave its approval on 6 December.

“Over the past few months, the LinkedIn and Microsoft leadership teams have been meeting to understand and prioritize the opportunities ahead,” CEO Jeff Weiner wrote to his team. “We’ve been able to see first-hand the level of innovation being driven at scale — in artificial intelligence, machine learning, the cloud, devices, and more. We’ve also had the chance to build a deeper relationship with Satya and the Microsoft leadership team, and to witness the strategic and cultural shifts they are driving, and the impressive traction they are seeing as a result.”

Weiner said day-to-day operations will essentially remain unchanged and the LinkedIn leadership team will stay in place.

LinkedIn meets with Russia

Separately, Reuters reported Russia’s communications regulator said on 8 December it had a constructive meeting with representatives of LinkedIn, which it had blocked last month over its failure to comply with a data storage law.

“The meeting with LinkedIn was constructive. The parties agreed to continue dialogue,” Vadim Ampelonsky, a spokesman for the Roskomnadzor watchdog, told Reuters. LinkedIn, which has its headquarters in the United States, became the first major social network to be blocked in Russia under a new law that requires firms holding Russian citizens’ data to store it on servers on Russian soil.