Correct, SOAP Toolkit is going out of support, so the recommendation is to
not do new development on it.

Office 2003 supports running .NET
and there are some nice tools "Visual Studio Tools for Office" available.
But as you point out, that requires an upgrade.

Office 2000 supports COM.  A simple way to connect a COM environment to .NET
is :

 - built a .NET client library for the various webservices
 - tlbexp the .NET client library, to expose it as COM objects
 - call those COM objects from Office 2000

This would utilize the existing Office 2000, but would also require .NET on
each client machine.  Within the client lib you can do smart client stuff,
like online/offline detection, caching, asynch communications.  You could at
some point migrate to all-.NET and Office 2003, but that isn't required.

A similar alternative is to just use the MSXML2.XMLHTTP component to
get/post to HTTP locations to retrieve info.  In this case the "wrapper" for
the webservice would be a webpage that would return XML, or anything you
want.   The webpage could be weblogic, or ASPX, or ... anything.   This is
less flexible than the COM-to-.NET approach, because it's not as easy to do
the smart-client stuff I mentioned.

so you've got options.

-D