On Gadgetopia, there's this new post that looks at PHP and COM integration - and how it's "quite awesome these days".

I do some hairy Outlook and Exchange programming. Not by choice, but by force — I have users that won’t give up Outlook for any reason, and they want it to interoperate with our PHP-based database.

PHP started supporting COM back in version 4, but I had heard it was buggy and annoying, with PHP functions just to set values on COM objects and such (“com_get,” “com_set,” etc.). But, being a glutton for punishment, I gave it try anyway.

Oh my, how things have changed.

He goes on about the enhanced support that COM integration with PHP has, and how simple it is to work with COM objects in your code. There's no code examples here, but it is a good testament to how well the COM support in PHP is being handled...