Vista - Generic document manipulation routine

Hi:
I'm trying to find out the best way to achieve this goal: In my University
exists an information center, this is a place with computers where students
can access the internet, do homeworks, etc.
An employee , receives students document files (when they need to print,
because there's only two printers in there) stored in a USB memory. Browse
the memory files using Windows File Explorer, selects the file and then,
doble click on it. This cause the associate application to open. Then the
employee manually goes to the application's menu and select the print
command.

Due to the printing demand, the printing PC has installed several
applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Acrobat Reader, etc) in order
to print any posible file that a student wanted to print.

I'm tryinng to automate the printing by implementing a printing agent
installed on every student PC.

There's a page count restriction. Each student can print ONLY 30 pages per
day.

I have been googling arround and i could found how to get document page
count for word and power point files. But those routines are using very
specific references, for example, in case of word files, I would need to use
Word object model, and so on with other apps.

Is there a generic way to retrieve document page count no matter the
application used to create the file? I am trying to avoid the use of
application specific references or object models.

I would appreciate any comments regarding this problem.

Best regards.

Sergio