"Welcome to Microsoft Office Labs." It's great to be able to say that. For quite some time the Office Labs team has been exploring ideas internally at Microsoft. Now we'd like to show you some of our ideas and ask you to give them a whirl.

We're a group of designers and developers that collect ideas from all over Microsoft (but mostly from Office and other products related to 'getting stuff done' - what we call 'productivity'). We build working prototypes of the most promising of these ideas to see if they work as well as we hope they might.

Concept testing is what this site is all about.  The projects you find here are not products or beta versions. They don't even pretend to be complete product ideas. They are the equivalent of 'concept cars' for software. Automotive companies sometimes produce near and far-future test vehicles to test design concepts or features to see how effective they are. In most cases there is no intent to productize the vehicles as shown. They simply work for the purposes of getting feedback. We do the same for software. The difference is that you to get to test drive the concepts. Because of that, all these experiences are strictly 'use at your own risk', and we can't promise to fix every bug that is reported but we'll try to nip the worst ones.

We are often asked if any of the things seen here will become products or features of products in the future. It's possible that some of them will appear in some form. But what we are really after is feedback and information from you. We want to know how often people use these tools. What parts of them are used most? What are the patterns of usage? Do they work for you? You may see some of the concepts updated over time to improve them based on the feedback. Even with all that, most of these ideas just won't make the cut for a product. Even when something is pretty useful, there are usually many other things even more useful to more people that are selected for inclusion in our products.

You might be wondering why this site isn't located on microsoft.com. One reason is simple: we didn't want to give anyone the impression that these projects are full blown Microsoft products. This site itself is also a concept test. Over time we'll be modifying it to experiment with ways to engage with you, our community.

You may have read the team blogs for various groups in Office, such as Word, Excel, SharePoint, and so forth. This is the Office Labs team blog. Check this space for updates from us on our work and behind the scenes stories about the various projects that show up here. And please, join in the discussion - we want to hear from you.