Microsoft Office Labs

Many of you who know about OneNote probably read Chris Pratley's blog from time to time as he used to work on the team and blog about OneNote.  Well I wanted to point out something that Chris has been working on: Microsoft Office Labs.  What is Office Labs?  Well from their site:

"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.

They do concept testing and prototyping of new ideas.  Thankfully they will be releasing some of the ideas that they had so that everyone can check them out.  A couple of cool ones include: Search Commands (used to be called Scout) which allows you to search through the available commands in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  Also Community Clips which will be an interesting way for people in the community to share tips, I hope to use this site more once I have more time to blog tips and tricks.  In any event check out Office Labs and try out the prototypes!