Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps are online mechanisms to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft OneNote applications that allow us to access documents from anywhere. Some of the features include concurrent editing with Excel files, meaning you can have several people all editing the same file at the same time. Way cool! Another is dynamic saving, which works in all apps except Word. This means there is no save button and changes are automatically saved back to the server.

Windows browser support includes IE 7 and IE 8, Firefox 3.5 and later, and Safari 4 and later. Expect good results when working from a Mac or Linux machine. You also have pretty good mobile support for viewing, but not editing files. Office Web Apps works on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, and some others.

Don’t look to Office Web Apps to replace your Office client; rather, it’s a complementary offering. Although the viewing support is fantastic, editing is limited and is only practical for lightweight tasks.

I would like to share some vital points that i had observed after the deployment of office web apps:

1. Office Web Apps must be installed on every server in SharePoint 2010 Farm

2. Office Web Apps is it is not a part of SharePoint 2010, its Office 2010 functionality and is integrated with SharePoint 2010.

3. SharePoint 2010 has to be installed first before you can install Office Web Apps.

4. Office Web Apps works with SharePoint Server 2010 or SharePoint Foundation 2010.

5. Installing Office web applications on SharePoint 2010 installed on Win 7 client is not supported.

6. Office web applications are meant for intranet and not for Extranet Collaboration Environments where there are large numbers of users.

7. 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.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned info then please let me know, Thanks...