creating an XML web service to send quotes data to MS Office

[Mark]

Hi

I would like to create an XML web service on an apache web server to send
data from the web server to MS office clients over http. Does anyone have any
pointers to any documentation that may help me in this endeavour?

Thanks in advance

 

[Mark]

According to MSDN, this is what I need to use to setup an XML web service:

server
====
Install MS IIS web server onto Windows NT/2000
Install SOAP Toolkit SP2 (and WSDL/WSML service locator files)
Create and install a COM DLL (containing the web service)
Install MS Internet Explorer (why??)
Install MSXML
Install the VB run-time environment

client
====
Install SOAP Toolkit SP2
Create an office VBA COM addin or macro to access the web service

Obviously this is very MS centric. Our environment contains an Apache web
server running on Linux. Therefore I cannot apply the solution as stated
above.

For simplicity (integration with office) I still want to create the COM
addin and COM DLL using VB6.0 but I want to expose the web service though an
apache web server (not IIS). Therefore I cannot use MS SOAP Toolkit SP2 or
MSXML parser. What are the alternatives here? I know that the apache Xerces
parser can replace the MSXML parser, but is there an apache SOAP toolkit that
I can use to expose the web service (WSDL/WSML files) and to handle the SOAP
requests?

Thanks
Mark