Microsoft has won European Union’s (EU) approval for its $26 billion bid for acquisition of LinkedIn, the professional social network after the software giant agreed to safeguards to assuage antitrust concerns, a report said.

The EU said it was clearing the deal on the condition that Microsoft allowed other professional networking sites access to programming commands for its Office applications and cloud-computing services for the next five years, reported the Wall Street Journal.

It must also grant computer manufacturers the option not to install the LinkedIn shortcut on desktop devices, the EU said.

It was in June that Microsoft said it would acquire LinkedIn.  “At that time, we said that we aimed to close the deal by the end of the year. Today, the European Commission announced that it has cleared the acquisition. As a result, we’ve now obtained all of the regulatory approvals needed to complete the acquisition, and the deal will close in the coming days,” said Microsoft’s chief legal officer Brad Smith in a blog post.

“As part of our discussions with the European Commission, we formalized several commitments regarding Microsoft’s support for third-party professional social networking services,” he added.

“We’ll continue to make our Office Add-in program available to third-party professional social networking services. The Office Add-in program enables developers to integrate their services into Microsoft Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel, providing users an enhanced experience using Office. As we continue to improve this program, these improvements will be available to third-party professional social networking services.

“We’ll ensure that IT administrators and users can customize their Office experience by choosing whether to display in the user interface the LinkedIn profile and activity information that may be integrated in the future,” Smith said.