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Server Office Automation Issues

Microsoft generally recommends against automating of Office apps on servers.

For a detailed technical paper on the subject, see MSKB 257757 Considerations for Server-Side Automation of Office

Highlights

"Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office Applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when run in this environment."

The paper lists several major categories of problems, including:

Then there are the licensing issues, about which MS says:

"Besides the technical problems, you must also consider the feasibility of such a design with respect to licensing. Current licensing guidelines prevent Office Applications from being used on server to service client requests, unless those clients themselves have licensed copies of Office. Using server-side Automation to provide Office functionality to unlicensed workstations isnot covered by the End User License Agreement (EULA)."

Because PPT2HTMLBatch queues up lists of files for processing and won't attempt to launch another batch while one batch is running, it sidesteps a number of the problems MS mentions. In fact, we have several customers running PPT2HTMLBatch on servers, but we cannot guarantee that it will function fully in all server environments. We strongly encourage you to try out the free, fully functional demo available at http://www.pptools.com/downloads.htm before committing to purchase PPT2HTMLBatch.

As mentioned earlier, Office apps expect to interact with the user; they may pop up dialog or message boxes and wait for user input before proceeding. This effectively hangs an automated process. See this article for suggestions:

How to dismiss Office dialog boxes programmatically

Search terms:office,automate,automation,server


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Server Office Automation Issues
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00497_Server_Office_Automation_Issues.htm
Last update 07 June, 2011
Created: