Microsoft Office 2010 Standard Introducing Word Au

[shishang82]

Over the last couple of months, we've posted about many of the exciting new features of Word 2010 – Co-authoring,Office 2007 Ultimate Key, the new Find experience, and the Word Web App. This week, at SharePoint Conference 2009, we announced one more (and one that I'm especially excited about): Word Automation Services.
In the post on framing the Word 2010 release, one of the pillars described is "Word Power in New Contexts". Word Automation Services is a big part of that pillar, and represents our desire to ensure that the power and functionality of Word is available beyond the desktop; in this case,Buy Office 2007, by enabling developers to harness the capabilities of Word on the server as part of SharePoint 2010. Word Automation Services
Have you ever wanted to convert .docx files into PDF? We've heard from many customers trying to perform server side conversions of Open XML files (.docx) into fixed formats (PDF and XPS) using the Word desktop application, and that's what motivated us to create Word Automation Services.
As a component of SharePoint 2010, Word Automation Services allows you to perform file operations on the server that previously required automating desktop Word: Converting between document formats (e.g. DOC to DOCX) Converting to fixed formats (e.g. PDF or XPS) Updating fields Importing "alternate format chunks" Etc.
If you've done any automation of Word, you're probably familiar with the challenges of doing so – challenges well documented by this Knowledge Base article: With Word Automation Services, those challenges are a thing of the past: Reliability – The service was built from the ground up to work in a server environment, which means that you no longer have to worry about issues like dialog boxes that bring the process to a halt, expecting a user to provide input; creating interactive user accounts under which to run the application to avoid running into permissions issues, etc. Speed – The service is optimized to perform server-side file operations, and in doing so provides performance significantly better than existing solutions. Scalability – The service can take advantage of the processing power available on typical server hardware (multiple processors, additional memory). For example, although a single instance of WINWORD.EXE can only utilize a single core of processing power, with Word Automation Services, you can specify the number of simultaneous conversions (and the # of processing cores) to use based on the available hardware.
And you still have a solution that has 100% fidelity with respect to the Word desktop application – documents are paginated the same way on the server as they are on the client, ensuring that what you see on the client is what you get from the server.
In future posts, I'll spend some time digging into exactly how the service works, as well as each of these benefits of the service in further detail. Word Automation Services and the Open XML SDK: Better Together
One of the most important things to understand about the service is what it doesn't do: this service is not intended to be a 1:1 replacement for the existing desktop object model.
Instead, the server is one half of a replacement for the existing object model – the other half being the Open XML SDK. The SDK is designed to handle tasks that don't require application logic, such as inserting or deleting content (paragraphs, tables,Microsoft Office 2010, pictures), inserting data from other data sources,Microsoft Office 2010 Standard, sanitizing content (removing content,Office Professional, accepting tracked changes), etc. The service is designed to handle those few tasks that do need application logic: reading all of the document formats that Word supports, converting to all of the output format that Word supports, recalculating dynamic fields, etc.
The two halves together enable the creation of rich, end-to-end solutions that never require automation of the client applications, yet sacrifice none of its capabilities – another topic we'll discuss in more detail in the future.
I wanted to keep this introductory post short, but there's a lot we'll talk about in the coming weeks – this service is a big part of our vision of "Word power in new contexts", and should change the way you think about and build document-based solutions on the server.
- Tristan <div