I’m considering using the Word Automation Services feature of SharePoint 2010 for a project. I will be converting single documents and my users will be waiting on the conversion so it needs to be as close to realtime as possible. The worse case of my users having to wait 1 minute before their document conversion is even started by the Word Automation Services worker process is not desireable. Can the Word Automation Services worker processes be set to run more frequently than 1 minute?
I don’t have a SharePoint 2010 Server to test on, but from the documentation I’ve read 15 minutes is the default and 1 minute is the lowest value that can be set. Increasing the number of worker processes might help if their run times were staggered evenly, but I haven’t seen any documentation that discusses that.
You are correct. There is no synchronous job execution in Word Automation Services for SharePoint Server 2010. The shortest time interval you can set in the WAS admin settings is 1 minute. Definitely a “must have” for any for the next version.