Vision
Word Services: brief discussion
Written by: Margriet Bruggeman, Nikander Bruggeman.
May 1, 2010
Word Services: brief discussion
Word Services is a SharePoint service application, that can be run on one or more application servers within a SharePoint farm, that allows you to manipulate Word documents on the server without requiring the need to install Word on the server itself. Word Services also exposes the Word Services API, a managed object model, which runs on each WFE and allows developers to tap into this power via .NET languages such as C#. This allows you to initiate, stop, or monitor bulk document assembly and conversion tasks. In the back-end, SQL Server keeps track of a queue of all tasks that are either pending, in progress, or completed. The results of bulk actions are stored in a location in the SharePoint farm. Word services looks like a valuable addition to the SharePoint set of services, with a robust implementation for doing bulk operations. Having said that, in the past we have used advanced document manipulation components such as the ones from Aspose (http://www.aspose.com) that have been able to fulfil all our needs in this area.