Office Web Apps 2013 Configuration – SharePoint 2013

Scenario : Configuring Single Server Office Web Apps Farm - For SharePoint Internet

 

Following are the Assumptions

 ·         SharePoint farm (sp1) and dedicated machine for Office Web Apps deployment are ready

 ·         SharePoint Site is accessible over internet through HTTPS

 This post describes only high level steps on how to setup Office web apps for internet and intranet.

 

Steps In Office web apps Server :

Make sure either you disable the firewall or open the ports 80,443 ,809 and 810 in firewall through inbound rules.

Make sure you have license for Office Web Apps  ( usually it is part of Office 2013 STANDARD license), if you have don’t license still you can configure office web apps however it is limited to view the documents.

1. Download Office Web Apps Server from the Microsoft Download Center.

2. Run Setup and walk through the steps in the wizard.

3. Make you sure also install Office Web Apps SP1 update (else you will get into issues)

Once you are done with above action items, then create office web apps farm by using power shell commands

 At this point you should have already planned who are the users and from where they are accessing/utilizing the office web apps features when logged in to SharePoint,

 

We need to specify 2 URLS in the command , one for internal users and other for external users. Since SharePoint is published to the internet we also need to publish the OWA server so that external users get authenticated by the OWA server.  Make sure both these two URLS are accessible

 

New-OfficeWebAppsFarm -InternalUrl <InternalURL> -ExternalUrl <ExternalURL> -CertificateName <CertificateName> -EditingEnabled

 Verify that the Office Web Apps Server farm was created successfully

 Go to the http://servername/hosting/discovery (intranet)

 Go to the https://<<public IP or public URL>>/hosting/discovery (external)

 If you see a (WOPI)-discovery XML file in your web browser then all is good.

 Please note : you need to get public IP and subdomain created in PUBLIC DNS and should raise request for SSL with this sub domain , these all should be in place and it will be done by network team.          

 

Steps in SharePoint Server ( no need to do this in all servers in the farm , login to any server in the farm):

 

1. Create new binding:

New-SPWOPIBinding -ServerName <WacServerName>

(<WacServerName> must be the FQDN internal URL)

2. Verify current zone:

Get-SPWOPIZone

3. Change to internal-https if it is set to http:

Set-SPWOPIZone –zone “internal-https

4. Verify https:

Get-SPWOPIZone

5. Verify functionality in a document library (Not using the system account, appearing as sharepoint\system)

 Click on the ‘Three dots’ after a documents name and see if you get a preview, if you do, its all good!

6. Done