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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
I just want to follow up on my preceding post, and mention that I was able to resolve the problem(s) by uninstalling Office Web Apps and SharePoint Foundation 2010 and then reinstalling.
Previously, I installed Office Web Apps immediately after SharePoint Foundation 2010 but before first running the Post-Setup Configuration Wizard. (I thought this would be an advantageous option given what I read in the Office Web Apps deployment doc.) The second time, I installed SharePoint Foundation 2010, went through the Post-Setup Configuration Wizard, checked things out, then installed Office Web Apps, going through the configuration wizard(s) after installation as mentioned in the Office Web Apps deployment doc. Things are all working fine so far.
Thanks to the team for the Office Web Apps. It was a thrill to see them working.
I would just like to add here that there is another problem With Office Web Apps. If you are installing Office Web Apps on a DC then you need to perform some extra steps to make it work. You have to run a Power Shell Script. I faced this issue and was able to resolve it. You can check the following Blog Post for the steps on How to make Office Web Apps work when installed on DC
sharepoint2010blog.blogspot.com/.../error-in-office-web-apps-when.html
Hope this information helps.
Regards
Anshul Sehgal
When I try to activate the Office Web Apps in the Site Collection features I get the following error:
Error
File Not Found.
Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.
Correlation ID: 3bde35a0-40cb-4009-9b56-98c49594b29e
Please help - we are anxious to test this feature out!
Chris
Follow up - I should have included a bit more detail.
I am having the sme results as Tim mentioned above and verified all of the steps that Frank recommended with the same results.
It isn't very clear to me, do I only run the Configuration Wizard IF I have NOT setup SharePoint 2010 Beta? Am I forced to deal with the Powershell nightmare if I already have a 2010 farm up and running? I installed it but the powershell isn't finding the services in the first powershell command.
@Hikmer - Unfortunately, if you've run the Farm Configuration Wizard once, you will have to use either PowerShell, or the Manage Services on Server and Manage Service Application pages in Central Admin. Fortunately, we just on Friday rev'ved our deployment documentation with up to date examples and instructions as to how to leverage both of these, thus, I'm hopeful that the new documentation will solve your issues with PowerShell. Check it out at the following location, and let us know if you have any additional problems: technet.microsoft.com/.../ee815687.aspx.
@Chris S - Chris, if you run the associated PowerShell cmdlet in the above documentation, do you get the same result? Have you ever installed the Web Apps on that machine, or is this a fresh installation?
New install of Sharepoint foundation and office web apps. Go to activate and I get this error
Correlation ID: 9ad10980-a3d8-4bea-ac04-afe11594077b
Problem solved.
Found this in event viewer
Alternate access mappings have not been configured. Users or services are accessing the site http://wsp with the URL http://10.1.1.51. This may cause incorrect links to be stored or returned to users. If this is expected, add the URL http://10.1.1.51 as an AAM response URL.
woops :)
I've gotten both the PPT and DOC files to open successfully in Office WebApps, but still having trouble with XLS (haven't seen any instructions for OneNote???)
In the <a href=technet.microsoft.com/.../ff431687%28office.14%29.aspx instructions for Install and configure Office Web Apps on an existing SharePoint server farm</a> under “create the service applications and the service application proxies” you are instructed to:
In the Excel Services Application dialog box, in Name, type Excel Services Application. In Application Pool, select Use existing application pool, and then in the listbox, select SharePoint Web Services Default. In Add to default proxy list, verify Add this service application's proxy to the farm's default proxy list is selected (default) and then click OK.
If your server farm already is running Excel Calculation Services, “Excel Services Application” <a href=technet.microsoft.com/.../ee837421%28office.14%29.aspx>already exists</a>, and cannot be created/configured for this purpose. The existing Excel Services Application does not allow you to configure Application Pool Settings
"The name is already being used but another Excel Services Application in this farm. Try using another name"
I've tried creating the Excel Services Application under another name, but no dice. What's the correct way to configure for Excel if the Calculation Services are already running (and the Services Application already exists)?
I have run into a mistake when i configure the PSConfigUI.exe.
Failed to load or formatstring Id ManagementUI_ExcelCalculationService_FriendlyName for culture zh-cn.
TypeInitializationException:"Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.Host.ExcelServerHost"
????
After following "the deployment guide" I ran into unexpected errors for all my documents e.g. "Word Web App cannot open this document for viewing because of an unexpected error. To view this document, open it in Microsoft Word."
The event log showed error 3760 from SharePoint Foundation, it's was a DB access error. It turns out the application pool account running my Web Apps services was trying to connect to the Web Apps Content database. I tried adding permissions via SharePoint Central Administration but in the end I added the services account directly to the SQL database and things worked.
I'm not expecting this hideous hack to be necessary when we move to production, I expect it's just a mater of waiting for more documentation. When I get some more time I'll look at the warning event 7362 from the Publishing Cache:
"Object Cache: The super user account utilized by the cache is not configured. This can increase the number of cache misses, which causes the page requests to consume unneccesary system resources.
To configure the account use the following command 'stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname portalsuperuseraccount -propertyvalue account -url webappurl'. The account should be any account that has Full Control access to the SharePoint databases but is not an application pool account."
Is there any way to integrate the Office Web apps into my own application?
Assume I'm creating my own web app. In my custom web app, I want to provide read-only views of Office docs (docx). Office web apps would be perfect for this.
Is this sort of integration possible? Or are Office Web Apps restricted to only SP and SkyDrive?
Is it possible to install Office Web Apps 2010 in SharePoint Standard Edition
Regarding error:
"Word Web App cannot open this document for viewing because of an unexpected error. To view this document, open it in Microsoft Word."
I too found that it was a permissions issue with the content database. I had setup the Office Apps services using my service account but the web application was setup using a separate content account.
kevin
Comments: (loading) Collapse