Office Web Apps deployment

Just a quick share of my experiences deploying Office Web Apps in our SharePoint 2010 environment.

After the release of the VLK bits last Friday and the Dutch Language Pack this Monday, we now had the right tools to move to the new 2010 wave. We had enough experience with the MSDN bits, but going to production you will need VLK (or non-dev licenses). Just as a side note: installing SharePoint 2010 (on any number of servers) is a breeze with AutoSPinstaller, which can be found on CodePlex.

To get an idea of what Office Web Apps is, visit the Microsoft website. I’m really crazy about it, because it allows people to view content very quickly, without opening additional client applications or even without requiring a rich desktop. You can use any kind of tablet, you don’t need powerful hardware or expensive licenses. You don’t need to wait on applications to launch and authenticate. It's fast. Just click on a document and off you go. Now that’s making things easy…

Speaking of easy, installing and configuring Office Web Apps is like launching Microsoft Paint (hint: hit Windows key, type Paint, press Enter). All you need is an up and running SharePoint 2010 farm (psconfig should be completed).

Start installation by running Setup.exe on each server in the farm. Remember to configure the location for the cache, storing this on the primary disk may decrease performance. Some services will be restarted, so make sure no users are active. After setup completes, the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard needs to run. You don’t need to configure anything here, just make sure setup has run on every server in the farm before running this wizard.

After this wizard has run on the servers, it’s time to configure. Up until now all we have done is installing the bits (using about 5 mouse clicks). Configuration can be done using Central Administration, but I prefer PowerShell. Much quicker and easier to reproduce. Basically, the steps are: (1) start services, (2) create service apps, (3) profit.

Starting the services is easy. A quote from Technet:

$machinesToActivate = @("contosoapp1", "contosoapp2")
$serviceInstanceNames = @("Word Viewing Service", "PowerPoint Service", "Excel Calculation Services")
foreach ($machine in $machinesToActivate)
  {
  foreach ($serviceInstance in $serviceInstanceNames)
  {
    $serviceID = $(Get-SPServiceInstance | where {$_.TypeName -match $serviceInstance} | where {$_.Server -match "SPServer Name="+$machine}).ID
    Start-SPServiceInstance -Identity $serviceID 
  }
} 

All we need to configure here is the first line: enter the names of the servers that need to run the application side of the Office Web Apps.

Next, creating the Service Applications is also easy.

$appPool = Get-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name "SharePoint Web Services Default"
New-SPWordViewingServiceApplication -Name "WdView" -ApplicationPool $appPool | New-SPWordViewingServiceApplicationProxy -Name "WdProxy"
New-SPPowerPointServiceApplication -Name "PPT" -ApplicationPool $appPool | New-SPPowerPointServiceApplicationProxy -Name "PPTProxy"
New-SPExcelServiceApplication -Name "Excel" -ApplicationPool $appPool

This will create 3 Service Applications (for Excel, PowerPoint and Word; OneNote does not need a Service Application). You might want to change the Application Pool that will be used for this.

From now on, all Site Collections that will be created will have the features for Office Web Apps activated. To activate these features for all existing Site Collections, run the following script:

$webAppsFeatureId = $(Get-SPFeature -limit all | where {$_.displayname -eq "OfficeWebApps"}).Id
Get-SPSite -limit ALL |foreach{Enable-SPFeature $webAppsFeatureId -url $_.URL } 

That’s all! You can’t really do much wrong here, but as with everything: running with the default might give you some surprises in the future. Spend some time reading Technet on this subject. It’s only a couple of pages on understanding, planning and deploying.

A nice bonus for international users: there is only one Language Pack needed for SharePoint (Foundation and Server), Project Server and Office Web Apps. No need to install additional Language Packs for Office Web Apps.