I am aware of of the infamous Considerations for server-side Automation of Office from Microsoft and it clearly lists products from the 2010 suite.
However, today I
I think everyone has proven your colleague has his wires crossed.
If the problem you are trying to solve is "how do I automate the generation of Word Documents?" then check out www.intelledox.com these guys have a .NET based Doc Gen engine which consumes data from anywhere, web service, XML etc to create documents.
They are then delivered somewhere like in an email, into an ECM system, SharePoint etc.
Means you can stand up an engine that creates standard letters and correspondence etc.