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

Answer 1

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.

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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.