Automating the conversion of Microsoft Office Documents to PDF/A

A central service to convert Microsoft Office documents to PDF or PDF/A has obvious advantages. The conversion is done on an enterprise wide platform with well defined software versions and conversion process configurations. This guarantees a consistent quality and makes the deployment and operation of client based software obsolete. The price for this, however, is that the central service must automate the native applications, such as Microsoft Word, which are designed for interactive use not for server operation.

If I had to build such a service my first naive approach would be to let the service perform the following automation steps: Run the application and call the "open file" and the "Save as PDF/A" functions. Unfortunately, this is not as easy. Why not?

Get information in our Expert Blog what the most important tasks for such a service are.