Office Web Apps and

More!The Office in Your Pocket

Colin Phillips :: SharePoint MVP :: itgroove

Who I am: Colin Phillips

My Background

15+ Years in Technology

Today: SharePoint Consultant and MVP (with itgroove)

Previously: 11 Years Developing Software, IT Infrastructure Projects, Workflows, Business Intelligence

and Many Other Related Topics

B.Sc. in Computer Science from UVic

My Blog

mmman.itgroove.net

Where to learn more

cphillips@itgroove.net

A note on naming…

• Originally called this presentation “Office Web Apps (now Office Online): What you don't know, can hurt you”

• Thought of a number of different ways to put it…

• What you don't know, can hurt you

• What you don't know, can't help you

• Please hammer, don't hurt 'em

• Eventually, the office in your pocket won out

… Which leads me to my next point

Microsoft isn’t any better at naming things

• What is OWA?

• According to Microsoft, its…

- Outlook Web App

- Outlook Web Access

- Office Web Apps

• Surprised Microsoft hasn’t come out with Orangutan Wrestling Association

• Microsoft even renamed Office Web Apps to Office Online (at least the Office 365/Online version)

OWA History

Product History

• Originally revealed in 2008, first released (in preview) in 2009, finally released to the public in 2010

• Several iterations have since come and upgrades have been made along the way (introducing features like

co-authoring and auto-save)

History with SharePoint

• Originally in SharePoint 2010 it was available as an add-on and was installed in the server itself

• To many SharePoint admins relief the 2013 product suite became its own set of farm servers

• OWA 2013 CANNOT be installed on a machine running SharePoint 2013

Office Web Apps / Office Online 101

• Office Web Apps is a collection of Office applications (for the web, obviously)

• They’re completely free – much like their competitors

• The suite includes online versions of each of the following.

• Word

• Outlook

• OneNote

• PowerPoint

• Excel

Also

• People (contacts)

• Calendar

• OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive)

“and More” 101

• Office 365 ProPlus (Office for your desktop - up to 5 devices)

• Full version of Office Professional Plus downloadable with certain Office 365 subscriptions

• Office RT version available for Surface tablets (basically like a full version of Office)

• Office Mobile

• For major mobile providers (iPhone, Android phones, Windows Phone) - $ Free

• For tablets (iPad – Word, Excel, etc. Apps available for separate download & licensed via an O365

subscription) [Android version confirmed coming in the future]

• Outlook Web App (Beta) for Android

• Office on Demand

• Full version of certain office products

• Accessible via OneDrive for Business (in Office 365)

Where can you find it?

Available throughout Office 365 (such as OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Office Online)

(Also available on Premises)

Can also be found in Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail, Windows Live, etc.)

Server Setup

On Premises (2013)

• Minimal hardware requirements

• Super easy to setup

• FREE! (for reading purposes)

• If you have either O365 E3 licenses or volume licensing, you can edit documents on premises for no additional cost

• Should be added to every SharePoint install - if you love your end users

• The easiest, most valuable use of server resources with simply the biggest bang for the buck

• Can be setup in a single-server, or multi-server farm arrangement (for redundancy and load balancing)

• To attest to its effectiveness and stability, Microsoft uses a single OWA server (internally) to run their entire company of 70,000+ users

Online

• No setup - it's just integrated into everything Office 365, Outlook.com, anything Microsofty

• Free for reading, and for editing purposes

Compare Native to Online – The Ribbon

As you can see, yes the interface is different – a few things are missing in the online version

The real question is; would you actually miss those features if you didn’t have them? Really, how often

do you do mail merging?

Compare Native to Online – The Context Menu

Online

Word (Office Professional Plus 2013)

Iterations

Year over year, the interface gets more refined and additional features make their way in.

Demo

Compare on premises to online

Integration

• On Premises OWA (a server installed locally at your office) can be used to integrate with Exchange,

Lync, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Yammer.

• Integration is super easy

• For example, integration with SharePoint is a single line of PowerShell

• It can also be used to integrate with LOB Apps, by being a rendering tool, responding to (the open

standard) WOPI requests (web services) and returning fully rendered (possibly editable) web based

documents, spreadsheets, and more.

• Viewing and editing can also be setup publicly over the internet (so you can share documents with

the public, and allow them to be edited by anyone)!

Office On Demand

• When?

• On a PC that you don’t use regularly - you won’t use up one of your 5 subscription licenses

• On a PC where you don’t have admin rights to perform an installation - such as a borrowed PC

• On a PC (at home or in public) where you have no Office software – or an older Windows OS

• How – It streams the application to your machine in a “virtual environment” – ends when app is closed

• Office on Demand is available for the following Office desktop applications:

• Word

• Project (if you have a Project Pro for

Office 365 subscription license)

• Visio (if you have a Visio Pro for Office

365 subscription license)

• Available for Office 365 Home Premium, Small Business, Midsize and Enterprise subscriptions

• Excel

• PowerPoint

• Publisher

• Access

Demo

Office on demand

Compared to Competition

• The feeling I got from reading numerous comparisons is that Google docs is like “a stripped down or

light version of Microsoft Office”

• “Office Online feels much more like MS Office than Google Docs does - right down to the ribbon”

• Office Online is the most seamless integration with and the most familiar interface as the office suite

most people use at work every day

• Similar to Google Docs, Office Online is essentially a free version of Microsoft Office for any device

running any modern web browser (from Linux PCs and Chromebooks to iPads and Android tablets)

• Both Google Docs and Office Online offer applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, and

presentations

• Google Docs also offers applications for creating forms and drawings, but Office Online offers a full-

featured note-taking app in OneNote

• Office Online saves your documents in Microsoft’s native Office file formats like .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx

• “Microsoft knows their own file formats, while Google Docs isn’t perfect at dealing with them.”

• As the author of one article put it;

• “Love it or hate it, Microsoft Office is still basically the standard when it comes to office suites.”

Accolades

Finally, according to time.com,

Office Web Apps is among the

50 best websites of 2013

Questions?

Contact Info:

Colin Phillips

cphillips@itgroove.net

blog: mmman.itgroove.net

@itgroove_colin