Installing Office Web Apps for SharePoint 2010

Recently, we got the request from one of our Client that, They need Office WEB APP Components Installed. I followed the below instruction to achieve this.So,thought to share with all.

Definition:

Office Web Apps was first introduced with SharePoint.  Office Web Apps is an online version of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note allowing users to access these applications and their respective documents from any Internet connection and most notable web browsers.  For those running SharePoint 2010, you can deploy Office Web Apps onto your SharePoint farm providing your users with the same functionality as the online version of Office Web Apps.  Deploying Office Web Apps on your SharePoint farms will add the following service applications;

·         Word Viewing Service Application

·         Excel Calculation Service

·         PowerPoint Service Application

will be extending my step by step SharePoint 2010 configuration articles and by the end of this post you will be able to open and edit Office documents from within your web browser without the requirement of having Microsoft Office installed locally.  This is a huge productivity gain for those that might be accessing their SharePoint sites from an Office is usually not available.

Installation:

You will need to download Office Web Apps from the Microsoft Download Site.   Let’s begin by launching the setup.exe and entering our product key;

                                

Accept the licensing terms.

                                  

Click Continue

Choose a file location for installation.  Ensure you select a drive with adequate free space for your Data partition which stores the Office Web Apps search index files.

                                            

Click Install Now

Upon successful installation, you will be greeted with the “Run Configuration Wizard” window.  We will immediately run the configuration wizard by leaving the checkbox ticked and clicking close.  You can also achieve the same by running PSConfig.  Both methods will register the Office Web Apps services.

                   

 

Click Close to Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard.
                                                   

Click Next and click Yes to acknowledging the restart of the IIS, SharePoint Administration and Timer Services.

                                                 

              

 

Click Next

Click Finish to acknowledge the successful configuration.

                                 

You will then receive the below Central Administration screen regarding configuring your SharePoint farm.  Because we have been configuring each service application one by one as needed (best practice) we will click cancel and proceed to activate the Office Web Apps services individually.

Provisioning the Office Web Apps Service Applications

Let’s begin by starting the relevant Office Web Apps services located under Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server.

Scroll down until you locate all of the Office Web Apps specific services, namely Excel Calculation Services, PowerPoint Service and Word Viewing Service.  Click Start for each respective service.

       

Let’s now navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage service applications.

Click on New / Word View Service

Enter the following details to complete the creation of the Word Viewing Service Application.  Ensure that you select “SharePoint Web Services System” from the Use existing application pool option.
     

Click OK

Your service application will then proceed with the creation process and will be listed with our previously provisioned service applications.

                                

You can now further provision the “Excel Services Application” and “PowerPoint Service Application” in the same manner following the above steps.  Please note that there isn’t a separate service application for OneNote.

Activating Office Web Apps:

Depending on where you want the feature activated, you will venture to your Site Collection(s) and activate each one individually or you can utilise PowerShell to activate multiple site collections at once within a single script.

From within your SharePoint Site, click on Site Actions / Site Settings.

Under Site Collection Administration, click on Site Collection Features.

Navigate down the page until you find Office Web Apps and click on Activate.
                  

You should now be able to open a Microsoft Word document from a document library on your SharePoint site and it should launch within the browser by default.

To ensure the best experience possible for your end users, you should install Silverlight.  The below warning will be will be displayed if Silverlight is not detected.
By default, your browser will open the document in view mode and it’s only until you click on Edit in Browser that you will receive the Office Web Apps editing toolbar.

Noted Things:

•  Installing Office Web Apps will change the default behavior when opening documents from open in client application to open in browser.
•       When installing on a SharePoint farm (i.e not a standalone installation), you will need to install Office Web Apps on every server.
•         Current list of supported browsers include Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox 3.X, Google Chrome and Safari 4.X.

Resources:

MS Article   : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee855124.aspx