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Last Month, Nick wrote about the Office Web Apps team attending the SharePoint Conference to discuss Office Web Apps and how they can be deployed on SharePoint Foundation Server 2010. With the impending Beta release of both SharePoint and Office Web Apps for business customers, we thought that it would be a great time to discuss some of the content which we covered at the conference, on this blog. Specifically, we wanted to spend just a little time in this post discussing:
While this is not intended to be an in depth treatment of deploying and managing Office Web Apps, I hope that it provides you with enough context to get you started on the path of deploying the Office Web Apps Beta on SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.
Thus, without further ado, let's turn our attention to exactly how these components are deployed to integrate with SharePoint and how you can get them up and running in your environment.
Before discussing the explicit steps involved in deploying Office Web Apps, I want to spend a few minutes giving an overview of how Office Web Apps work. That way, if an issue does come up, you'll be able to better troubleshoot any issues that might arise as you begin to both deploy and run Office Web Apps on a daily basis. Further, you'll also be able to better tune Office Web Apps for your particular environment.
From a high level, Office Web Apps are designed to represent your document, natively, in the browser, using only standard browser objects, such as HTML, JavaScript, etc. Tangentially related, it's because we attempt to adhere closely to HTML standards that these renditions work well in all of our supported browsers, including Firefox and Safari. The key to understanding how Office Web Apps work is to understand where the magic happens to generate this native representation of your document in the browser.
Fundamentally, our system is designed to be run across two components: the web front end and the back-end (commonly known as the "application server" in SharePoint parlance).
As illustrated by the above diagram, the front-end components consist of a series of web pages and handlers that are largely responsible for generating and returning an HTML based representation of the document to the browser. Additionally, some, but not all, of the front-end components rely on assistance from the backend in generating this representation of the document. These backend components, which consist of a series of services ("shared applications," again, in SharePoint parlance), are responsible for heavier weight operations, such as performing calc in the case of Excel, or generating an image based representation of the document or presentation in the case of Word or PowerPoint. The front-end components leverage the output of each of these backend services in order to produce the final view of the document in the browser.
It's worth noting that these components don't necessarily have to run on separate boxes. In fact, if you install SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 in evaluation mode on a single machine, and then install Office Web Apps on top of that installation, everything will run successfully from that machine.
Now that you have a high level understanding of exactly what components Office Web Apps will add to your SharePoint installation, and how they work, let’s turn our attention to exactly how you install Office Web Apps. While the details can be found in the deployment guide, from a high-level, the process looks like this:
If you are attempting to install Office Web Apps on a farm with a large number of site collections, or you are looking to do a staged roll-out, one thing to be aware of as you set out to install Office Web Apps is that they will take over the default click behavior in all document libraries automatically. Thus, we recommend that you change settings such that default-click goes to the client, as described in the last section of the deployment guide. That way, customers will be able to continue interacting with their documents from the Office desktop applications, while the Office Web Apps installation completes.
It's worth noting that the above information only starts to skim the surface of this topic. To learn more about how to deploy Office Web Apps on SharePoint, you should take a closer look into the deployment guide. Additional resources will also start to be made available for each of the individual Office Web Apps over the next 6 months, as we continue to generate more content to help you better administer the Office Web Apps deployed on SharePoint (keep an eye on the blog and Technet for more updates).
In the meantime, we hope that these resources will give you everything that you need to successfully install and administer Office Web Apps in your enterprise for the Beta2 timeframe. If you have any trouble at all, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Franklin Williams, Program Manager, Office Web Apps
Comments: (34) Collapse
Fantastic post. I can't wait to give these a go.
Is the Office Web Apps going to be integrated into the Office Live Workspace like it is in the SkyDrive? I would have thought that it Office Live Workspace would have been the perfect place to put it since that already had a tie in to Office and it has the Office brand already instead of SkyDrive.
Fantastic new products are, well, fantastic.
What we really need next, though, is fantastic new licensing. I've been waiting for this first peek at Office Web Apps, and now that it's here, I find that I'm not very excited. If it's just an addon to Sharepoint, then I have all the same problems I've already had with Sharepoint: primarily that it's just not legal to use in most of the collaboration schemes that I or my employers or clients come up with. It's all fine and good internally, but once you have to -- colaborate -- it's too much expense and challenge to figure out how you make it legal.
I'd love to pay for using office in more scenarios with more users, but I don't see it happening with the old licensing. (And I'm never ever going to pay the prices I've seen before for 'external connectors').
Can you help us?
Will it be possible to install and use Office 2010 Web Apps, without upgrading our SharePoint platform from MOSS 2007? We are still working through our rollout project for MOSS 2007, but would really love to take advantage of the collaborative capabilities offered by OneNote Web App.
Has anyone gotten this to work? I've installed the Office Web Applications Beta on Sharepoint 2010 Beta. However, I only see "An error has occurred" on the Excel Viewer, and "An unexpected error has occurred." for the Word Viewer. It does successfully route all links to docs, xls, ppt to the non-working viewer though!
Better error handling would be helpful.
As an update, I went ahead and created a new site collection after Web Applications installation. I was able in this new site to create Word documents, but not able to view them.
Enabling OfficeWebApps across all the site collections (via PowerShell) brought all other sites to the same level of the new site collection from my previous comment. However, I still cannot view the files. The menu options for Excel, Word and PowerPoint are now visible, and briefly, a "Loading..." message. However, in less than a second, I see:
Excel : An error has occurred.
Please try again.
Word : Word Web App cannot open this document for viewing because of an unexpected error. To view this document, open it in Microsoft Word.
PowerPoint : The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.
It seems almost like a permission issue or a DNS routing issue. However coming in from localhost, machinename and an internet hyperlink all yield the same result.
We were getting similiar errors until we added the sharepoint site to the "Trusted Sites" under Internet Options/Security. You might need to uncheck the require https box.
@Pete - The Office Web Apps are only supported on SharePoint 2010. The OneNote Web App in particular relies on a lot of the core efficient file transfer work which is being added in SharePoint 2010. Because of this, you will unfortunately need to do another upgrade to SharePoint 2010 in order to take advantage of the Web Apps.
@Tim - It sounds like your service applications may not be running. Can you go to Central Admin and check two things for me?
First, click on "manage services on server." Once navigated, validate that the following services are started:
- Word Viewing
- Excel Calculation
- PowerPoint
If they're not started, then start each of them. Once you've done this, then navigate to the "manage service applications" page from central admin. Once there, validate that you have at least one instance of the following service applications with their corresponding proxies (the service applications will be listed under type):
- Word Viewing Service Application
- Excel Services Web Service Application
- PowerPoint Service Application
If you're missing any of the above service applications, or those applications do not have a proxy located directly underneath them in the list, try using the "new" button to create the necessary service applications (proxies will be created automatically). Once you've done this, things should be up and running. If you've validated that things look to be running according to the above, and you're still seeing errors let me know and we'll take a deeper look.
Thanks!
I am using Office 2010 - Beta2. Installed Web apps and activated it for the collection. I can also see the services running properly:
- Word Automation Services
- Word Viewing Service
When i open a word document (*.doc) either by clicking on the link or selecting View in Browser from the menu, i get the following error message:
Word Web App cannot open this document for viewing because of an unexpected error. To view this document, open it in Microsoft Word.
Error Id: 68d8674b-53ac-407c-bfd7-9ef2a2c16611, 20091210124532
What am i missing? Thanks in advance for your help.
@all with "An unexpected error has occurred"
please do as mentioned above:
Activate “Office Web Apps,” listed under SharePoint’s Site Collection Features, on each site collection for which Office Web Apps should be available.
I have installed office 2010 Beta but do not use a sharepoint server of my own.
I have had fair-poor success syncing a Sharepoint List of contacts on Office Live Web Business Contact Manager with outlook.
Has anyone used MS info path in office 2010? I would like to know if there is a sharepoint server I can use to test this product. Any ideas?
Jeff
Follow-up:
What I am trying to do is create a form that users will find on my website. When the user hits submit. I would like the information to go to a third party hosted (Office Live?) document library.
I hope to sync some of this data with fields in my Web Business contacts list and also be able to search the data using access queries.
Would like to request some assistance...
Installed MS Office Web Apps with SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta (single server farm with SQL Server). Everything went smoothly until near end of the Farm Configuration Wizard, where I got "The timer job completed, but failed on one or more machines in the farm." errors for each of the following four services: Business Data Connectivity, Excel, PowerPoint, Word.
In "Manage Services on Server" I see that the following services are indeed among the services started:
- Business Data Connectivity
However, in "Manage Service Applications" I find among the apps:
Business Data Connectivity Service Application: Error
Business Data Connectivity Proxy: Started
Excel Services Web Service Application: Stopped
Excel Services Web Service Application Proxy: Started
PowerPoint Service Application: Stopped
PowerPoint App Application Proxy: Started
Word Viewing Service Application: Stopped
Word Viewing Service Application Proxy: Started
How can I fix the service apps that are either Error or Stopped?
(Note: Under "Site Collection Features", the site already shows "Office Web Apps" as Activated with no intervention on my part.)
I'm new to SharePoint, and would appreciate any guidance. Thank you very much in advance.
Comments: (loading) Collapse