First off, the little voice inside my head is screaming that this is a bad idea and it shouldn’t be done, but my pragmatic side is asking “How bad could it be?”
The stark fact is most of my company’s day to day “business” happens in one MS Office tool or another. Data is exported out of our custom tools as *.tab, *.csv, manipulated in Excel and imported back in with variying degrees of success.
Most of these custom tools are ASP.NET MVC web applications whose usability could be enhanced by more interoperability with Office.
I’ve fought the good fight for many years saying Office on a web server is a terrible idea. Lately I’ve been thinking that the enhanced usability outweighs the potential risks.
Am I going crazy?
You don’t say what version of MS Office you are using in your workplace or what type of interoperability you are after.
If you want to generate Office documents ‘on the fly’ directly from the web application, then if you are using Office 2007 or 2010, the default document formats (.docx, .xlsx) are based on the Open XML SDK. This means that it is possible to generate documents dynamically without having to install MS Office on the web server.
If you are using Office 2003 or earlier, it is generally considered bad practice to install MS Office on the server – it is an unsupported configuration.
This Microsoft article outlines many of the possible issues you may face if you decide to go down this route.