Last week Microsoft released Office 2007 Beta 2 to the world, and had somewhere over 500,000 downloads in the first two days. The primary reason for releasing this test version of the software so early is to get as much feedback from the Office using community as possible, soon enough that final product decisions can be made before it is released to manufacturing. 

To that end, the Office team has released a utility called Send a Smile. Once installed, it offers both a happy face and sad face icon in your system tray. The idea here is that when you find something in Office that you want to make a positive comment on, you click the smiley face, and if you find a problem you click on the sad face. Jensen Harris reports that in the past features that were thought to have been rarely used would be removed, only to find out that many people enjoyed the use of that feature. Sending a smile is offered as a way to effectively vote for your favorite features, to ensure they make the cut when Office 2007 is finally released.