Hi everyone! By now folks have also been able to see that we’ve changed the default save location in Office to SkyDrive. We're excited to talk about the change, and why it offers the best experience for storing, sharing and collaborating Office documents.

Social is rewiring the way we communicate and collaborate. Facebook and Twitter have completely transformed how we connect in our personal lives. And new social tools are making it easier to get things done at work.

We believe that the social enterprise needs to be a natural part of the way people get things done, creating a connected experience that extends and enhances familiar tools. And we recognize that companies often need to secure and manage social interactions, just as they do other forms of communication. Our social investments in this release are designed to accomplish both goals.

We have made major new investments in the new Office to support international users who work in languages other than English.  Three new languages have been fully localized for the first time and Language Interface Packs added in 13 more.  The range of languages supported in Office 365 and in Office Mobile has also been greatly extended. For the many international users who need to consume or create content in more than one language we are introducing new ways to access Office proofing tools in additional languages.

I’m Beth Petry, I lead Customer Programs for the Office division. Throughout the cycle I’ve had the chance to work with many people evaluating Office. It is an exciting time for us to share it with the world. We’re very excited to have your feedback. Office Preview is off and running!

Many thanks to those of you who have downloaded the preview release. We’re getting a lot of great feedback. Please keep it coming! If you haven’t had a chance to get it yet, you can find the preview release of Office on http://office.com/preview.

Developers can now build apps that enable brand new user experiences and scenarios by combining web technologies and cloud services right in Office and SharePoint. New experiences that we could not have dreamt off before. As an example, customers can acquire a collection of apps on stitch them together to create powerful solutions to monitor metrics with KPIs right in Excel. Apps in SharePoint that help solve specific goals that users have like planning events or managing their business contacts.

Beginning this week at the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), you will have opportunities to have in-depth dialogues with the Exchange team – both in-person and virtually. We kick off this week with a blog post that highlights a need of organizations everywhere and of every size as they look towards ensuring they have control of their data in a secure and manageable fashion. We hope to continue the conversation with you this week at the conference, and in the future via the EHLO and Office Next blogs. Today Harv Bhela, General Manager for Exchange Program Management, joins Office Next to kick off the week.

We often see IT set a significant amount of their discretionary spend aside to help them deal with deployment surprises that pop up. In the new Office, we’ve done a lot of work to help give IT much more visibility into what people are using within Office and SharePoint so that they can be better prepared going forward.

Signing in to Office 365 Home Premium unlocks a world of new functionality between Office and the cloud. Whether you're using a phone, PC, or tablet, you can be at home, school, work, or on the bus and your files and applications are there wherever you are. Learn how we've connected Office to the cloud to make anywhere, anytime productivity possible and see how subscription and sign-in are how we make all of this goodness happen.   

Tristan Davis, Senior Program Manager Lead, Word

Nearly two-thirds of user sessions in Word contain no editing at all – the only things that happen once the document is opened are scrolling and zooming changes as the user reads and processes the content. The Word engineering team wanted to focus on creating a refreshed, modern reading experience for the new Word; one that optimized for the times when the user is focused on consuming, not creating, content. The goal was to create a clean and distraction-free environment that went beyond presenting an electronic equivalent of paper to create an experience that felt at home on all types of devices – from tablets to laptops to smartphones.The result is a new reading experience in Word centered on a feature called Read Mode, which essentially turns your Word documents into an interactive digital magazine. You can try it out by participating in the Office Customer Preview, and in this post, I will provide a quick tour of the changes we’ve made.

We’re wrapping up another outstanding week of the Office Preview release. We are getting a lot of great feedback, and hope to get much more. Please continue to help us by sending us your smiles and frowns, and forums feedback on Microsoft Answers, TechNet and MSDN coming.

This week many teams across the division have begun blogging about their specific investments. There is a ton of great information out there for you to read and share. I wanted to highlight some of those early posts here.