Office Web Applications In SharePoint 2013 – Bigger, Faster, Better?

Jul 232012
 

At the same time that SharePoint 2010 was released, the Office team released the Office Web Applications. These browser versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were tightly integrated with SharePoint and in fact originally required SharePoint to run. To install them, you would stand up a SharePoint server, and then install the web application bits on that server. Like a service pack or CU, you would then run PSCONFIGUI to integrate the bits into the farm, and install the relevant service applications. Simple enough.

However, there were some quirks associated with them. As noted here, removing the web applications from the server would actually remove the server from the farm. Simple enough to correct, but if you uninstalled the SharePoint bits before uninstalling the Office Web Application bits, you could be left with an effectively inoperable server.

During the 2010 release lifetime however, we started to see the Office Web Applications pop up elsewhere. Initially powering Facebook’s docs.com, they could also be seen as part of Windows Live. Obviously, when Office 365 was released, they were front and center. With this increasingly broad adoption, and requirement for scale, a reliance on SharePoint as a platform made less and less sense, and now, for 2013, we get a new architecture.

Standalone Web Applications Server

The big change is that Office Web Applications is no longer reliant on SharePoint. It installs and configures independently and it can serve any number of clients, SharePoint being one, and Exchange being another. In fact, it’s now positively hostile to SharePoint and other servers – you can’t install it on a machine where the SharePoint bits are installed at all. The same goes for Exchange, Lync, SQL Server, or anything really. The following is from the TechNet document “Plan Office Web Apps Server Preview”:

Servers that run Office Web Apps Server Preview must not run any other server application. This includes Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Lync Server, and SQL Server. If you have hardware constraints, you can run Office Web Apps Server Preview in a virtual machine instance on one of these servers.

Do not install any services or roles that depend on the Web Server (IIS) role on port 80, 443, or 809 because Office Web Apps Server Preview periodically removes web applications on these ports.

Do not install any version of Office. You must uninstall Office before you install Office Web Apps Server Preview.

 

The Office Web Application Server really doesn’t play well with others. It pretty well demands that it is installed in isolation from other servers, which in reality means that a small SharePoint farm will consist of 3 servers – one SharePoint front end server, one SQL server, and one Office Web Applications server, and while virtualization makes this much more palatable, it may be a bit much for some smaller organizations to swallow.

Setting It Up

The official (pre-release)  document on planning and deploying the Office Web Application server can be found here and here respectively. Originally, I had planned on putting together a step by step walkthrough, but Steve Peschka from Microsoft published this article today that does precisely that.

Steve’s article is great because it describes the process of setting up the server with both http and https. Http is fine if all traffic is internal, but if you will have any external traffic, you must set it up with SSL (if security matters at all to you..), and the server will support only one zone, you cannot use both http and https. As you would expect, setting it up for SSL is more complex than for http.

All of the setup is done with Powershell. Powershell is fantastic, and highly useful, but I don’t think that anyone would claim that it’s easy to get started with, especially for small farm administrators,

I think that it can safely be concluded that it’s significantly harder to get the Office Web Applications installed with 2013 than it was with 2010.

Takeaways

Anyone running a two server SharePoint farm with the Office Web Applications on 2010 will wind up with a three server farm after upgrading to SharePoint 2013. This can be done via virtualization, or by standing up another physical box. Depending on the workload, the Office Web Application server doesn’t need to be particularly powerful, but no matter what, it introduces an added level of complexity. For those that heavily leverage the server, that’s a good trade-off, but for others, perhaps not.

The Office Web Applications are a fantastic set of tools, and they have been significantly improved in 2013. I am however concerned that the lack of a smooth architectural transition path from 2010 combined with the lack of a simple setup process may keep some (smaller) organizations away from it. Of course, those organizations will also have the option of moving to Office 365 where these services will already be set up and running.

Something tells me that this may just be the point.  

TechNet Radio Community Corner Interview

Feb 092012
 

Last November, I was interviewed by Sr. Technical Evangelist John Weston on the MVP program, Office 365, Cloud Computing, Business Intelligence, and how these things all tie together. The entire interview was conducted online using Lync online, available in Office365. It’s now online, and can be seen below.

You can see other Technet Radio episodes by visiting the Edge site here

Why I Love Office 365

Oct 212011
 

OK, so my company is a Microsoft partner, and we’re supposed to like everything that they throw our way right? That’s actually not true. I’ll certainly give most things that they do a fair shot. It’s also true that I’m willing to sacrifice a certain amount of capability for either ease of use, or for the way that Microsoft products work well together, but as I noted in a previous post, I only gave up my BlackBerry when Microsoft came out with a product that was worth using.

My company is small (currently 6 people) and widely distributed. Cloud solutions make perfect sense to us,and we have been using Exchange Online for over 2 years now. Our requirements for SharePoint went beyond what was possible in BPOS’ offering, but since migrating to Office 365 6 months ago, the  new SharePoint online fits the bill, and more and more of our corporate assets live there now.

UnlimitedViz is currently primarily a SharePoint services company focused on Business Intelligence, and a significant portion of those services involve architecting SharePoint environments at a lower level, which involves sizing servers, making resource decisions, etc. I personally love designing solutions and watching them come to life. We are certainly more than capable to maintain our own SharePoint infrastructure, so why would we want to use an admittedly more limited version of the product that is maintained by someone else?

Pretty much because it’s maintained by someone else.

As mentioned above we’re small, and we need to be focused on what we do best, which is providing services to our customers, and building product. Maintaining internal systems, no matter how good we are at it, is a distraction, and a significant cost, both capital and operational. The per user cost of Office 365 is pretty simple to justify from just a cost standpoint, but there are many more benefits that are brought to the table.

No matter what the location of a team member, they can easily access what they need to. Lync brings that down to the voice and IM communication level. No need to mess around with access methods, VPNs, Firewalls, Reverse Proxy servers and the like. We can get to our content easily on site, at home via whatever device we happen to need. Granted, I could set that stuff up on-premise, but now I don’t have to! I also know that my data is safe, and the performance is going to be good. Two months ago, Exchange online suffered an outage for about two hours (the only hiccup I’ve experienced so far). My initial reaction was “what can I do to fix this”, but that was quickly superseded by  “It’s not my problem to fix”, so I just sat back and got other work done.

As we bring more customers onto Office 365, supporting them just gets simpler. A simple client request can be acted upon immediately by launching a browser window, and connecting to their site, seamlessly. With most onsite installations, I need to start a virtual machine, connect through a VPN client, and then hope that the correct tools are installed on the VM, or the client site, depending on the access mechanism. I try to keep a VM image available for every type of VPN client used, which is a hopeless and necessary task due to the incompatibilities between clients. In my opinion, the world will be a better place when VPN clients are eliminated (or at least consolidated”).

Customers using Office 365 don’t need VPN clients, and it makes it that much easier (and cheaper for them) for us to support them.

There a a whole bunch of great features about Office 365 (Shared OneNote files accessed via Windows Phone, browser and client is a good one, not to mention Lync), but the reason that I really like it is that it’s solid, it works, and it lets my business focus on using its tools, not maintaining them.

SharePoint Online Fall 2011 Service Update Starts Oct 20

Oct 132011
 

Today, Microsoft sent out a bulletin to SharePoint Online users notifying them that they would begin rolling out the Fall 2011 Service Update. This is the much vaunted update announced at the SharePoint Conference 2011 that includes BCS services. For those that don’t already subscribe, the list of new features can be found below (copied from the official email).

Feature

Description

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) <WCF Connector> *Enterprise plans only

Enables connecting to external systems via web service based endpoints

External Sharing: Windows LiveID support

Allows Office 365 tenant administrators to invite external users to a site collection. They sign in with a Windows Live ID-based user name and password.

Windows Phone 7 “Mango” (official support and http:// connectivity)

Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango,” now enables both small business and enterprise Office 365 customers to access SharePoint Online lists and document libraries from their Windows Phone.

Recycle Bin: deleted site self-recovery

Self-service ability to recover sites from a site collection’s recycle bin

Browser support: Internet Explorer 9

Adds official support for the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser

Browser support: Chrome

Adds official support for the Chrome browser


How to Add the SRV Records for Office 365 to a DNS Provider

Jun 282011
 

The documentation provided with Office 365 combined with the new interface make configuration of it much simpler than with BPOS. However, it isn’t without a few small bumps. I ran into one of these when I was setting up our own organization to use the Lync features. One of the requirements was to add two SRV records to our external DNS, as per the image below:

image

There are actually some great guidelines and walkthroughs for setting this up with specific registrars, such as GoDaddy. However we’re using DynDNS, which is not one of the ones documented. Fair enough, I can find my way around a configuration screen, but the problem was that our DNS provider is somewhat old school. The SRV records are considered advanced (and therefore assume that I know what I’m doing with DNS), so instead of giving me nice, clearly defined fields like TTL, Port, and weight, I am presented with a single TXT field entry screen.

image

This is fine if you’re a DNS expert, and know how to construct the strings, but I’m not. After a fair bit of hunting around, I was able to sort out the following syntax for adding the requisite SRV records:

Host TTL Type Data
_sip._tls.mydomain.com 60 SRV 1 100 443 sipdir.online.lync.com.
_sipfederationtls._tcp.mydomain.com 60 SRV 1 100 5061 sipfed.online.lync.com.

 

Take special note of the period at the end of the data field – this is in fact required. Once these values were added, we were off to the races with Lync – which is awesome by the way…

Your mileage may vary depending on your DNS provider, but hopefully it will help if you’re in a similar situation.

 Older Entries