Almost there with a Powerpoint extract

[Guest]

This is (hopefully) a last hurdle to cross on a bit of a hack I've written (with this group's help, thanks). To provide a small team assistance in a rather massive data conversion effort, I've built an ASP script that scans/scrapes a pile of PowerPoint presentations that are in an agreed-upon format and pulls in textual data from these files to be uploaded into a database

Believe it or not, the thing is (a) working, and (b) not too strange

However, it only works for me (a member of the web server's administrators group). When one of the "normal" users tries to hit the page, they receive the following error

"The call to Server.CreateObject failed while checking permissions. Access is denied to this object.

This occurs on the CreateObject call for the PowerPoint.Application object. Obviously it's a permissions problem, but I'm struggling to figure out what I need to change/add to fix it.

To make the PowerPoint app available to the web server, I installed it using a normal Office (2000) install process for PowerPoint and the Office Web Components only. (I was logged in as myself, meaning an administrator was the installer.

I assume there's a DLL out there that needs the proper security settings (read+execute, I presume) set for it, but I'm stumped as to which one and where. So far, I've tried granting authenticated users (the page and entire site are set to use NTLM/Windows Integrated Authentication) read/execute privileges on both the Office directory and the Common Files directory under Program Files, but no luck. I've also registered the msowc.dll explicitly (although I think that occurs with the install anyway), but again, no change. I've tried using Filemon to figure out which file is doing the denying, but it's not reporting a permission denied anywhere

Any/all tips or answers highly welcome

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Not to shirk the problem, but it *does* sound like a server/security settings issue,
doesn't it?

I suspect you'll find a solution faster by cobbling up a very simple example bit of
code (ie, something that does nothing more than attempt to create then destroy the
object). Verify that it works for you, fails for other users, then post it to one
of the IIS/ASP newgroups on this server.

This is (hopefully) a last hurdle to cross on a bit of a hack I've written (with

this group's help, thanks). To provide a small team assistance in a rather massive
data conversion effort, I've built an ASP script that scans/scrapes a pile of
PowerPoint presentations that are in an agreed-upon format and pulls in textual data
from these files to be uploaded into a database.

Believe it or not, the thing is (a) working, and (b) not too strange.

However, it only works for me (a member of the web server's administrators group).

When one of the "normal" users tries to hit the page, they receive the following
error:

"The call to Server.CreateObject failed while checking permissions. Access is denied to this object."

This occurs on the CreateObject call for the PowerPoint.Application object.

Obviously it's a permissions problem, but I'm struggling to figure out what I need
to change/add to fix it.

To make the PowerPoint app available to the web server, I installed it using a

normal Office (2000) install process for PowerPoint and the Office Web Components
only. (I was logged in as myself, meaning an administrator was the installer.)

I assume there's a DLL out there that needs the proper security settings

(read+execute, I presume) set for it, but I'm stumped as to which one and where. So
far, I've tried granting authenticated users (the page and entire site are set to
use NTLM/Windows Integrated Authentication) read/execute privileges on both the
Office directory and the Common Files directory under Program Files, but no luck.
I've also registered the msowc.dll explicitly (although I think that occurs with the
install anyway), but again, no change. I've tried using Filemon to figure out which
file is doing the denying, but it's not reporting a permission denied anywhere.