I have a customer that wanted to use Office on their servers to automate certain functions for their web sites. Some people want Microsoft Word to crank out documents for customers on a web site. Others want to run calculations through Excel Macros and output the results to the web. Yet others want Visio to diagram things for people and put the output on the web browser.
The bottom line however is that this is generally not a supportable and recommended usage of Office.
That being said, we have a rather interesting article that discusses how to do it and what the caveats are and why we don’t support Office in this configuration:
- Q257757: Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;257757
Developers can use Automation to Microsoft Office to build custom solutions that utilize the capabilities and features that are built into the Office product. While such programmatic development can be implemented on a client system with relative ease, there are a number of complications that can occur if Automation is to take place from server-side code such as Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), DCOM, or a Windows NT Service.
This article discusses the complications that developers may face, offers alternatives to Automation that can speed performance, and suggests ways to configure Office if server-side Automation is unavoidable. Developers should be aware, however, that the suggestions provided below are for informational purposes only. Microsoft does not recommend or support server-side Automation of Office.
Note In this context, the term "server-side" also applies to code that is running on a Microsoft Windows NT or Microsoft Windows 2000 workstation, provided that it is running from a WinStation other than the interactive station of the user that is logged on. For example, code that is started by Task Scheduler under the SYSTEM account runs in the same environment as "server-side" ASP or DCOM code, and therefore experiences many of the same issues. For more information on WinStations and COM, see the "More Information" and "References" sections.
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 