We're finding out that WF doesn't save the output as a "XLS" file but in an XML format. I think it's an Open Office format can't be sure. Is there a way to export the "Excel" format? What would the output format code be? Is there a way for IBI to compress the XML format before sending it through the wire?

When your output format is "EXL2K", then the response is an XHT file. It's a fancy pants XML format for Office. If you change your output format to "EXCEL", then you would actually get an XLS file. However, you would lose a lot of the formatting options that you get with the EXL2K output.

There is a compression option between the WF Client and Server (via the client admin console), but I do not know what has to be done to implement properly (you should probably call NY on that one). Worse case scenario is you could implement your own compression routine using a Filter pattern to wrap the response object.

Thanks for the quick feedback.