Long ago I had a project where we needed to generate Word documents. We ended up using a fake X-Server running OpenOffice and some queuing mechanism to manage the fact that each OpenOffice instance could only handle one conversion job at a time. No fun, but it worked, does not scale amazingly obviously. Back then I of course also tried the KOffice converter which is easily run with little overhead via a CLI interface. Unfortunately it wasn't really up to the job in terms of Word compatibility.

When I first heard of Apple adopting KHTML for their Safari browser, I was praying they would do the same when they replace their AppleWorks suite. Unfortunately they didn't. The good news is that Nokia seems to have adopted KOffice for their Maemo platform, which means that KOffice will come bundled on the N900 Linux smartphone. W00t! Looks like they are focusing on MS Office compatibility too, though I guess for now they focus on import and not on export. But its all very good news indeed and could make it a lot easier to solve these kinds of client needs in the future!

Did you try to run a recent openoffice in "headless mode" ? You don't need fake X-Server.
We are building a prototype with OpenOffice and JODConverter. But we didn't already test multiple conversion jobs at a time.

Yeah, afaik current OpenOffice is still not able to do multiple conversions with just one instance. Though making this possible is on their roadmap for the next major release.