I'm developing a CRM in Java and I need to mail merge my contacts into a template file, so I searched a bit around how to do it and the only satisfying answer was to use COM via JACOB
But I prefer to ask experienced people on it before starting to learn COM, which seem to be an old tech.
Is there a "better"* solution that Java+JACOB+COM to mail merge MSWord (Doc and Docx) documents with Java ?
*I think that's pretty subjective :/
EDIT : I'm limited to free solutions