Read office excel 2007 documents from within silverlight

I have a requirement to read in an excel 2007 file (*.xls) from within Silverlight, then extract data from this xls file. My background in web tech tells me this might be impossible to do, but I thought I would ask the question anyways.

The solution that comes to mind is to create a service which can handle this extraction, but this implementation is for a huge user global user base, and we're concerned about not having enough server resources, hence we're investigating client side options.

It will be a corporate intranet, but we the users are familiar with an exact xls file layout, and cannot convert before handing over to the Silverlight component.

1. So firstly, is this type of thing possible with Silverlight, I know it wasn't a few years ago
2. If its not possible out of the box, any 3rd party components, commercial or open source?
3. I've thought about writing a client side WCF app that will service requests from Silverlight in this way send the opened xls file to the WCF service app, process -> send results back. Do you think this is plausible?
4. If not Silverlight, could flash or a Java Applet handle conversion from xls to xml client side, and communicate this info to the silverlight app?
5. Wh开发者_JAVA技巧at about Microsoft Office Online, do you think its possible to get the file in binary format into the silver light app, then send it to open office, and get it back as xml?

Thanks in advance.

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I'm investigating this, http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=576