Issues with Office 2007 Beta 2

I have been using Office 2007 beta 2 now for a quite some time now since I first downloaded it. While the overall user experience is very good with most of the functions grouped logically (I still take some time to find some function or other that I have not used yet), the most critical application in an enterprise i.e. Microsoft Outlook breaks down on a very key and useful feature.

With much fanfare, Microsoft released the Windows Desktop Search that integrates with Outlook 2007. Although I still haven't figured out (I don't have time) how to use the desktop search for files on my computer, I have found it very useful for searching through the mountain of email that I get (and I am sure everyone does). Suddenly, a couple of days back, the Windows Desktop Search broke down and refuse to show me any results of searches. Here I searched for email containing "google" and it returned no results. I know for a fact that there are emails with the word "Google" in it. And before you suggest, I tried both "google" and "Google" and it returned the same results i.e. no items found.

I initially thought the the search componnent was broken and so I proceeded to uninstall and reinstall the component. The uninstallation process asks you to restart the computer to complete the uninstallation. After I rebooted and started Outlook again, it predictably asked me to download and install the search component to maximise the search capabilities. Once I clicked OK to download, it took me to a webpage which told me that the download is unavailable. OK!!

Luckily I had the previous downloaded file which I used to reinstall the Windows desktop search on my computer and tried again. Still the same issue. It is not able to search anything. Now I don't have any search capabilities on my Outlook so I have to remember real hard when I received a particular email if I want to retrieve it.

So now, here's what I am going to do. I am heading right over to Microsoft's website to report this issue in the forums and hope that they will take notice and fix this because the EULA for Office 2007 Beta 2 specifically warned me that as this is Beta, I should not use it in production and support will be limited to support forums only.