Peter, there may be a way, but it would be much more related to Office
development than ASP.NET development. With ASP.NET, you can;
+ Build a page that generates a document, and appropriately MIME's and
Names it. Any document type can be generated, but .NET also offers a strong
set of tools for generating XML.
+ Build a page that acts as a data source, e.g. an XML file or a
comma-separated (CSV) file. You can use an ASP.NET page to expose address
lists for import into Outlook, to generate XML for treeview databinding, and
probably for mail merge purposes as well.
Knowing that, you should spend some time with the Office SDK and online
resources to craft a solution that works best. I understand that Office
2003 has excellent support for XML, though I've never examined it. It -may-
be possible to simply generate an XML file to the Word 2003 spec, and
generate your Serial Letter that way. Otherwise you might create your
Serial Letter manually and then mail merge it using a data source that is
generated by a different ASP.NET page.
As a third option, you could have ASP.NET use automation, start Word,
generate the document directly. This sounds very resource intense and
therefore unstable in a server situation, but it may be worth exploring.
Also there are third party libraries that allow you to generate most Office
document programmatically using an API.
Best of luck,
/// M
