PowerPoint permissions issue

[Bret]

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

At the moment, I'm tagging the various shapes I want to extract (all text boxes, all in bulleted list format) by setting the alternative text of the shape to a specific value. That way, I know text box A goes here, text box B goes there, etc

This is fine, but involves someone going through and tagging the existing presentations (we can set the tags up on the template for the future, but there's still a pile to deal with now)

Is there another property that I might be able to exploit that does NOT require additional handiwork? For example, all of the fields I want are in specific locations on the slide, and they're not so close together such that I'd need a real tight range. I was thinking that I could pick up the text box with upper left hand corner in the general area of x=10, y=40 or some such and know that it was field A, etc., but I can't see any such property

The fields I want are all text boxes, but there are many other text boxes, so that's out. The data is all bulleted, but I need to know which one is which, so using that alone won't work

[Tom Kaminski [MVP]]

"Bret" <an*******@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7A**********************************@microsof t.com...

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.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=257757

--
Tom Kaminski IIS MVP
http://www.iistoolshed.com/ - tools, scripts, and utilities for running IIS
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...y/centers/iis/