FUNCTIONALITY OVERVIEW

Before looking at the topology and installation of the Office Web Apps, this section first takes a look at its improved feature set, underlying technology, and expanded functionality. As mentioned earlier, OWA is now a standalone product that, unlike other SharePoint 2013 features, sits outside of the SharePoint 2013 farm. With other SharePoint features, the normal progressions model has been to integrate deeper into the SharePoint architecture. An example of this is the Project Server progression between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010. In the SharePoint 2007 farm you were able to leverage Project functionality, but only when specific interface programs were in place to make SharePoint 2007 aware of Project 2007. In SharePoint 2010 the entire Project product was based in SharePoint 2010, and it cannot be separated from that SharePoint 2010 farm because it is installed as a service application in the farm. Now, the Office Web Apps product stands outside of the SharePoint 2013 farm but still provides the same, and some greatly improved, features to it.

NEW FEATURES IN SHAREPOINT OWA 2013

Office Web Apps 2013 offers users a whole new set of features, greatly increasing its value in a SharePoint 2013 farm. Among these are the following:

• Change tracking — Enables a true collaborative experience, showing tracked changes akin to the desktop Word product in the Word Web App
• Comments — Enables users to view, add, and even reply to comments in the Word Web App and the PowerPoint Web App
• Co-authoring — Enables concurrent editing across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents
• Embedding — Supports native embedding of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote documents
• Ink support — New Ink support for Word and OneNote documents within SharePoint 2013
• Quick preview — Enables fast previewing of search results, a feature previously available only in FAST search results
• Share by link — Enables users to send a link of a document so that the recipient can use Office Web Apps outside of SharePoint
• Shorter URLs — Unlike OWA in SharePoint 2010, which created massive URLs if you linked to a document, now you get friendly URLs.

This is a rather brief subset of the new features of the Office Web Apps.

ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONALITY FOR MULTIPLE SHAREPOINT FARMS, LYNC, EXCHANGE 2013, AND FILE SHARES (VIA OPEN-FORM URL)

New Office Web Apps functionality is not limited to a single instance of SharePoint 2013; it now supports multiple SharePoint 2013 farms, Lync 2013, Exchange 2013, and even the capability to open files from a URL. This represents a drastic shift in how the Office Web Apps functions to provide its service to multiple applications.

Integrating OWA with Exchange 2013

Exchange Server 2013 leverages Office Web Apps 2013 to preview e-mail Office file attachments. Using Word Web App, Excel Web App, and PowerPoint Web App, the Exchange 2013 server can deliver a full-fidelity preview. Moving the Office Web Apps service to the server level makes the clients less dependent on desktop-installed software to provide this functionality. Office Web Apps also lends this functionality to the Exchange 2013 Outlook Web Application.

Using Office Web Apps, you can work with the following file types in Exchange:

• Word documents
• Excel documents
• PowerPoint documents

Integrating OWA with Lync 2013

Office Web Apps 2013 has also been extended to Lync 2013. This enables the standard file types in SharePoint 2013 to have the same functionality in Lync 2013. PowerPoint Broadcast has been removed from SharePoint 2013 and added to Lync 2013. Deployed in Lync 2013, PowerPoint Broadcast addresses some previous limitations regarding the use of dynamic content. Lync 2013 leverages Office Web Apps 2013 to deliver presentations via the PowerPoint Web App. Note that Lync 2013 is now the engine behind the PowerPoint Broadcast server while the Office Web Apps provides the viewer. The PowerPoint Web App uses standardized DHTML and JavaScript to provide PowerPoint Broadcast’s improved features, which include the following:

• Better mechanism to support native PowerPoint animations, slide transitions, and embedded video
• Better support for a wider range of tablet and mobile devices
• The capability for users to interactively scroll through slides without affecting the actual presentation

LICENSING AND VERSIONS

Office Web Apps offers some significant changes from the previous version in the licensing arena. There are two licenses in Office Web Apps this time around. The default Office Web Apps mode is view-only, and it is provided free. The other mode enables both viewing and editing, and this mode must be licensed. Users must have the appropriate license, known as WacEdit, before they can edit in the browser. To enable this mode in Office Web Apps, you must set the -EditingEnabled$true either when creating a new farm with the New-OfficeWebAppsFarm cmdlet or when updating an existing farm with Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm: parameter to

• New-OfficeWebAppsFarm — This is used when you are creating a new Office Web Apps farm on the server. The following example creates a new Office Web Apps farm as an internal resource with a certificate whose friendly name is server.internal.contoso.com:

  New-OfficeWebAppsFarm –InternalUrl https://server.internal.contoso.com 
  -EditingEnabled:$true –CertificateName server.internal.contoso.com

• Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm — This is used when you are configuring settings on an existing Office Web Apps farm. The following command enables view-and-edit mode for an existing Office Web Apps farm:

  Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm –EditingEnabled:$true

You can even divide the licensing into separate groups. As with SharePoint 2013, you can leverage different licensing levels to achieve the appropriate functionality. For example, it wouldn’t make much sense to license your entire company for enterprise functionality if you only have a small group of power users who need the SharePoint Server Enterprise advanced feature set. By default, when you enable editing capabilities via the New-OfficeWebAppsFarm or Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm cmdlets, all users in SharePoint are granted editing rights and therefore must be licensed appropriately.

Because Office Web Apps uses SharePoint 2013 licensing capabilities, the associated SharePoint farm must already be configured to leverage individual SKUs. Using the New-SPUserLicenseMapping cmdlet, you can isolate specific Active Directory security groups, forms-based roles, or SharePoint user licenses to a particular Office Web Apps licensing model. After you create the groups to your satisfaction, you can use the Add-SPUserLicensingMapping cmdlet to add them to the Office Web Apps farm. Finally, you enable the group using the Enable-SPUserLicensing cmdlet. To review your licensing groups, you can use the Get-SPUserLicenseMapping cmdlet. In addition to the preceding cmdlets, also available are the following cmdlets, which should be self-explanatory:

• Disable-SPUserLicensing
• Get-SPUserLicense
• Get-SPUserLicensing
• Remove-SPUserLicenseMapping

A final note about controlling farm behavior is necessary. On the SharePoint 2013 farm, an administrator can use the PowerShell cmdlets New-SPWOPIBinding on a new farm or Set-SPWOPIBinding on an existing farm to set the file open behavior on a per-file-type basis for the farm. At the site collection or document library level, site collection administrators and SharePoint 2013 users with appropriate permissions can set the default file behavior for Office Web Apps files.