Office Web Apps

Here’s another post with scripts from my sessions at SharePoint Conference 2014 – this time from the Mastering Office Web Apps 2013 Operations and Deployments session (SPC383). To get a more in-depth explanation of all the details, please watch the recording at Channel 9. Let’s start…but first! OWA = Outlook Web App and WAC = Office Web Apps (Web Application Companion). Preparing the machine before installing Office Web Apps Before you install the Office Web Apps bits on the machine you need to install a set of Windows Features.

Wow, that was an awesome conference! SharePoint Conference 2014 is over and I’m very glad I attended the conference – both as a speaker and attendee. Finally Microsoft and the SharePoint Product Group told us about their future and vision for SharePoint and SharePoint Online. If you knew how long we have waited for this… I’m glad they start to sort out the service (ie Office 365) and now can add new capabilities into the platform.

Introduction This is a story from the trenches where Excel Web App in Office Web Apps 2013 refuses to render Excel documents, while other Apps such as Word and PowerPoint works just fine. The end-users are met with the generic error message: “We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request.” The problem is easy to solve but can be somewhat difficult to locate and in this post I will show you how to find the issue and fix it.

If you have been working with SharePoint you should know by now how to get the build version of an installation using PowerShell. Knowing the version of the installation is crucial for troubleshooting and knowing what features or limitations the current installation has, given the new release cadence. If you don’t know how to do it then Bing for it and then return here. But how do you do the same for Office Web Apps Server 2013?

Introduction A couple of weeks back I blogged about the March Update for Office Web Apps 2013 and also how you could use that update to show PDF previews in a SharePoint 2013 Search Center. Since then I’ve received a lot of requests on how to enable PDF Previews in a Document Library, which isn’t there by default. Of course it is not a WAC thing, it’s a SharePoint 2013 thing – but the SharePoint 2013 updates (up until now at least) does not provide this capability either.

Overview and background This post is intended to show and explain why you see the intermittent (and annoying) “To start seeing previews, please log on by opening the document.” message when using previews from Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) with SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately I do not have the magic bullet (yet) on how to solve it completely, this post is more on why you get it and how you can avoid seeing it too often.

Introduction I frequently see one specific question asked on distribution lists, Twitter, Yammer and other social networks: “How do I install Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) on the same machine as SharePoint 2013”, very frequently also followed by “any hacks accepted”. Those who have tried have noticed that there is a hard block – SharePoint cannot be installed on an Office Web Apps machine and Office Web Apps cannot be installed on a SharePoint machine.

Here goes a post in the middle of the summer, directly taken from yet another e-mail conversation with information that I thought was well known. It has been blogged before, but perhaps you readers (thanks mum and the other one) don’t follow those blogs, so here we go. Introduction Who doesn’t like Excel? Most people love it so much that they can’t get enough of it and uploads the Excel files to SharePoint and view and edit them using Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC).

Introduction This is a follow-up post on the SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps 2013 and Excel files with Data Connections post that I previously wrote. That post talked about how you needed to do, so called, WOPI Suppressions if you had Excel files with Data Connections and had those data connections configured to use the authenticated users account. The WOPI Suppression made sure that the rendering of the Excel book was done by Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 rather than with Office Web Apps 2013.

As you might have noticed I have somewhat fallen in love with Office Web Apps 2013, or WAC as we say now that we’ve gotten this close to each other. It’s an amazingly well written server product with the good side benefit that it is also very usable for the end-users. Even though me and WAC has been hanging around for a while and by now know each other pretty well, WAC has constantly been reporting that it is Unhealthy.

Today at the SharePoint Evolutions 2013 Conference I announced my latest pet project called Open WOPI. Open WOPI is an open WOPI client that allows you to extend SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 with file previews and editors for any type of file formats. The project is now (at least very, very soon) available to download from openwopi.codeplex.com and is published under the Ms-PL license. This is currently an early beta (or what you would like to call it) but will be improved over time.

I’m really glad to see some patches being rolled out for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps 2013. There’s some really important fixes and some very interesting fixes that I’ve been waiting for. In this post we’ll take a look at the first Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) update – specifically we’re looking at how to patch your WAC farm to minimize the downtime. If you follow my instructions you will have zero downtime (except for a brief moment where Excel stuff will not be accessible).

In my last post (still smoking fresh) I showed you how to update your Office Web Apps 2013 farm to the March 2013 update, connect it to SharePoint 2013 and being able to view PDF documents in the browser. What I didn’t explain or show in that post was how to enable the PDF Previews in Search – but I’ll do it now. Pre-requisites Before you start fiddling with this, you need to make sure that you have the March 2013 update of Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) installed and connected to your farm – if you don’t know for sure, ask your admins – sometimes they know…if they don’t give them the link to my previous blog post.

With this new wave of SharePoint, the Office Web Apps Server (WAC – I don’t like the OWA acronym, that’s something else in my opinion) is its own server product, implementing the WOPI client protocol, which allows a client to retrieve documents from SharePoint on the behalf of the user. Documents will flow from the WOPI servers (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange etc.) to the Office Web Apps Server – this means that potentially confidential information will be transferred from the SharePoint environment and stored/cached on another server.