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Things you should know when you are planning deploying office web applications with SharePoint 2010

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Office Web Applications is one of the coolest features available with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, there are couple of things you need to be aware of when planning an Office Web Applications Deployment

  • One of the important things to understand about Office Web Apps is it is not a part of SharePoint 2010, its Office 2010 feature and is tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010. For On Premise Deployment SharePoint 2010 has to be installed first before you can install Office Web Apps.
  • Office Web Apps works with SharePoint Server 2010 or SharePoint Foundation 2010
  • Installing Office web applications on SharePoint 2010 installed on Win 7 client is not supported, unfortunately what that means is if you are an enterprise dev building solutions based on office web apps, you would need to have server based dev environments :(
  • Currently Office web applications is meant for internal only deployments and not external facing for ex Extranet Collaboration Environments where there are large number of users. Office license is required for every user which is what makes it not an ideal scenario for external facing deployments. :(  IMO this will be a big issue for some customers especially in extranet scenarios where they are collaborating with large number of vendors who don’t even have office on the client and don’t plan to have office on the client, office web apps would have been so appealing because of SharePoint 2010 integration and web based office experience it provides, unfortunately like I said earlier office license requirement will make it an expensive deployment hence not ideal for external facing deployments.
  • Office Web Apps must be installed on every server in SharePoint 2010 Farm
  • Although you can control default open behavior to open using Office Web Apps, you cannot control the default new behavior to use Office Web Apps. What I mean by this is if you have Office Installed on Client its always going to use office client when you try to add new document to document library
  • You can’t restrict users from opening documents in Office Client, I have had few customers ask this, if client PC meets all requirements user will be able to view document in Office Client
  • Do not attempt to uninstall office web apps, you must simply disable it, office web apps does not uninstall cleanly and bad things happen :), so if you are thinking about office web apps make sure you worked out all the licensing details before you do.

Finally if you want to see Office Web Apps in action in external faxing/hosted scenarios go to https://skydrive.live.com or https://docs.com

Technorati Tags: Office Web Apps,SharePoint 2010