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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T23:38:07+00:00

What licensing issues arise if I install and use Microsoft Office software (in this

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What licensing issues arise if I install and use Microsoft Office software (in this case Visio) as part of my web service backend?

My company’s flagship piece of software can convert Microsoft Visio files for use in their environment, but of course requires a local install of Visio to decode the files. The system I’m to create is to offer a sort of web service where people can upload their Visio files, and then we can show off the benefits of buying our full price software.

In order to do this I’d need an install of our software on the server, as well as Visio. What I’m a little concerned about is technically any visitor to the site is technically using Visio. I can’t really find any other examples when searching online (it doesn’t help when things like “server”, “cloud” are essentially buzzwords) so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

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  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t know the legal details but MS say if you do this every user would require a Visio Licence. You can certainly do it technically but MS also warn that office automation was intended to be done in an interactive session – I take this to mean they don’t guarantee that its not going to pop up a dialog or something at some point. They provide server side options for most office products but not Visio.

    I don’t know what your application is but I can think of three options that may be relevant:

    1. Create a downloadable application that opens Visio and converts the file to your internal format and then uploads it to your server

    2. Have files uploaded to the server which then creates a task for someone in your company to download the file and do something with it. You could significantly automate this process

    3. Get the users to upload VDX files and process the data as XML

    Note if your application is using Visio in such a way that you don’t have your own internal data structure can you use option 1 and just have some of the functionality done on the server through authenticate web services? this way they get to see what it can do but it only works while connected to your server.

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