Ran into a problem with Office licensing on hosted servers. I won't go into details, but Microsoft's stand is that if any portion of Office code resides on a server and users potentially have access to that code - they have to pay a user license, even if the software is only there to export a flat file into an Office format that will be copied to a share somewhere that officially licensed Office users will access. Make sense? If even a single Office .dll is there, and you've got 100 users hitting that machine, each one requires a license. Trust me, we danced with Microsoft for weeks trying to find a solution to this.

We considered Libre Office and OpenOffice - and neither was an acceptable solution. They just don't work right in a Microsoft oriented corporate environment. They simply don't scale beyond small to *medium* business if you plan on having any interaction with the rest of the corporate world.

Ultimately, the licensing cost was prohibitive for the benefit gained and there was no FOSS or 3rd party alternative, so we had to drop the service being rendered for the time being. If *any* FOSS Office solution would have fixed my problem, I would have adopted it in a heartbeat.