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Unless your collegue already knows ActiveX and COM I would suggest someone new to MFC to stay away from a project that combines MFC and ActiveX.
The reason being is that it typically takes about 6 months to learn the basics of COM. Learning how to build a proper container that takes pluggable ActiveX components takes a bit longer.
...yep... despite one can be confident on his learning skills at the end of the day if you say that takes 6 months to learn, and you are a moderator of this website, it means that is likely to be harder than expected. I will keep learning MFC and I am sure that will be enough of a struggle to master and learn.
I am wondering, for future reference, are COM and ActiveX used in many project and with different languages?
Not sure about "many projects", but per my experience the intention to involve COM may be very and very different. In one of big commercial projects I lead, there are three COM out-of-proc servers accessed by PHP and C++ code, and one windowless ActiveX embedded in client front end. Another big WinCE project I participated in was comprised of several COM servers written and accessed in bare WinAPI/C++ only. The other VB 6.0 project used lots of COM servers, MS and third-party made. And one more project I lead is designed as C# front end with couple of in-proc COM servers used (windowless again :)). No surprise though, I do that as long as I have some experience in COM. And lots of other projects conducted by the company have not a trace of COM technology, been done for Linux and MacOS platforms.
By the way, COM has very little connection to MFC. Though I made a couple of ActiveXes in MFC just to train myself, I always prefer ATL to create ones. :D