The transitions that organizations and people are making to the cloud enable many new opportunities for sharing with others.  We believe that the best way to leverage the cloud is to connect the best-of-breed applications to feature-rich services.  We do not believe that a one-size-fits-all browser based solution is suitable to meet the needs of both work and personal computing because it misses so many opportunities to leverage the power of rich applications. We know that people work online and offline - internet connectivity should never be a barrier to productivity.  These beliefs underlie our work in connecting Office to the cloud and shape our philosophy for the entire release.

In this post, we'd like to talk about how we've taken Office and connected it more naturally to the cloud. Let us know what you think about these new capabilities and please give us feedback about what you'd like to hear more about in the coming posts.

PJ Hough, Corporate Vice President of Program Management, Microsoft Office Division

Welcome to the Office Next blog.  I'm really excited to kick off this conversation and connect you with the engineers who are building future releases of Office-here, they'll discuss the improvements we make, the designs we choose and the data and feedback that inform our decisions.