Experiencing Office Web Apps in SkyDrive

Microsoft Office Web Apps are online companions to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, enabling people to access and do light editing or sharing of Office documents from virtually anywhere. Office Web Apps is available to consumers and businesses through:

1. SkyDrive in Windows Live: For consumers and small business users, Office Web Apps is available on Windows Live as a free service through SkyDrive offering
2. On-premises using SharePoint 2010: Business customers licensed for Microsoft Office 2010 through a Volume Licensing program can run Office Web Apps on a server running Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

To understand the user experience and features in both cases, you can refer to Using Office Web Apps in Windows Live and Using Office Web Apps in SharePoint pages in the Office 2010 product information and support website.

Microsoft Office Web Apps Deployment Resource Center
Microsoft Office Web Apps Deployment resource center has been launched recently which provides tools and resources for IT professionals planning to deploy Office Web Apps in a SharePoint environment.

The Understanding Office Web Apps and Introduction to working with Office Web Apps provide a good technical background before you start the Office Web Apps deployment in an enterprise. Refer to the Deploy Office Web Apps (Installed on SharePoint 2010 Products) article to learn to deploy Microsoft Office Web Apps.

co authoring excel sharepoint 2010 / SharePoint 2013

TechNet article provides guidance for administrators to configure co-authoring for their organization. Many of these are using Windows PowerShell cmdlets.

• Configure versioning for co-authoring (SharePoint Server 2010) - When multiple authors work on the same document, edits are retained on the server as document versions. This article describes how to configure document library versioning settings for co-authoring.
• Configure the co-authoring versioning period (SharePoint Server 2010) - When versioning is turned on, SharePoint Server takes periodic snapshots of documents, saving them for later reference. This article describes how to configure the co-authoring versioning period.
• Configure the maximum number of co-authoring authors (SharePoint Server 2010) - Administrators can limit the maximum number of authors that can co-author a document at the same time. This article describes how to configure the maximum number of co-authoring authors
• Disable co-authoring (SharePoint Server 2010) - Co-authoring can also be disabled on the client side using Group Policy. This article describes how to disable co-authoring
• Co-authoring functionality in SharePointAll_2nd_CurrentVer and SharePoint Online
  
• Understanding the end-user experience of co-authoring in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online
  
• Important planning considerations for co-authoring in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online
  
• Planning considerations for co-authoring in OneNote notebooks
  
• Software version requirements for co-authoring in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online
  
• Co-Authoring in a mixed Office environment
  
• Performance and scalability considerations for co-authoring in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online

Office Web apps Overview

Some important feature included in SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft Office Web Apps is the online companion to Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications that enables users regardless of their location to access documents and edit documents. Users can view, share, and work on documents with others online across personal computers, mobile phones, and the Web. Office Web Apps is available to users through Windows Live and to business customers with Microsoft Office 2010 volume licensing and document management solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

Office Web Apps is tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010 Products. When you install Office Web Apps, the Office Web Apps Services are added to the list of SharePoint Services and the Office Web Apps Feature is added to the available SharePoint Features.

Office Web Apps services include the Word Viewing Service, PowerPoint Service, and Excel Calculation Services that are created and run within the context of SharePoint Services.

The Office Web Apps Feature and services integrate with SharePoint's robust enterprise content management capabilities to provide users the ability to access and work on your organization's documents from anywhere using a Web browser.

For More Detailed Information check the Below link .

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431685(v=office.14).aspx

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...