Office 2010 server side automation in a Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Environment

Question

I am aware of of the infamous Considerations for server-side Automation of Office from Microsoft and it clearly lists products from the 2010 suite.

However, today I was made to believe by an IT ops techie that Office 2010 does not suffer from the issues mentioned in that article and can be used without issues within a server environment. I have been unable to find any reference or supporting doc that would substantiate the claim. (I will follow up with him on this, however he must have been referring to some other server side technique) My gut tells me he was smoking his socks!

Is there an Microsoft based solution for server side automation for Office 2010? If yes, can you please provide a relevant link that supports the claim.

(I am not looking for a Spreadsheet Gear, OpenXML SDK, OpenXML etc. related answer)

Answer 1

Your IT OPS techie should send you a link to any information that suggests this. You should then post the link here.

That way, we can try to get the link corrected. Office hasn't stopped being a COM-based desktop application. Do not attempt to automate it in a multithreaded (server) environment.

Your techie may be thinking of the fact that there are now web versions of some of the Office products.

Answer 2

If he's referring to automating the Office 2010 client on the server, he continues to be wrong. If he's referring to newly available functionality on the server that automates some Office document processing, he's right. It's likely he's referring to the later and has just skimmed some marketing material and came to a conclusion in his head that Office client can now be a headless automation server or some such thing.

Office 2010 on the server side came with a number of Application Services that work with SharePoint 2010 that significantly assist with server-side processing of some Office documents and functionality. In particular:

• Word Automation Services
• Excel Services
• InfoPath Forms Services
• and Visio Services

Answer 3

It would seem that the techie was not that far off and there actually was some validity to his claim. I refer you to Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 which deals with High Performance Computing (so this does not apply to your run of the mill type workbooks that I guess most people deal with) . This does make sense considering the company I am working at is with the insurance sector. Note: this only works for for a High Performance Computing server

I refer you to a Microsoft techincal whitepaper

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 now enables running multiple instances of Excel 2010 in a Windows HPC cluster, where each instance is running an independent calculation or iteration of the same workbook with a different dataset. Many complex and long-running workbooks run iteratively—that is, they perform a single calculation many times over different sets of input data. These workbooks might include intensive mathematical calculations contained in multiple worksheets, or they might contain complex Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) functions.

...

workbooks may need to be modified to work with this solution. When Excel 2010 runs on the server, it does not support user interaction. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 includes a comprehensive pop-up manager that can handle occasional dialog boxes and pop-up messages, but it is not designed to support interactive Excel 2010 features

There is also another doc: : Accelerating Excel 2010 with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2: Building VBA applications and workbooks for a Windows HPC Cluster which goes into detail as to how to building Excel solutions for a HPC server.