Wictor Wilen

Two weeks ago the ship returned to Stockholm from a 48 hour cruise on the Baltic Sea hosting the 10th edition of SharePoint and Exchange Forum. As usual the conference was a great show arranged by MVP Göran Husman and his Humandata crew. Thank You! We enjoyed a lot of great sessions from well-known speakers around the world and we spent the nights in the bars (and on the tables) during the nights. I had a lot of fun even though it was a bit weird having my first session just as the ship left the harbor and turned sharply – as far as I could see no one got sick, at least not from the sea.

This is a sad and dark day for the Microsoft community, especially for us who love products such as SQL Server, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Microsoft Learning (MSL) has decided till kill their advanced certifications; Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) formerly known as Microsoft Certified Master (MCM). This is also a post I hoped not to write, as the matter of fact I started drafting a post a couple of weeks back that should recommend these certifications to the community out there, that post will never see the light now.

Overview and background This post is intended to show and explain why you see the intermittent (and annoying) “To start seeing previews, please log on by opening the document.” message when using previews from Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) with SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately I do not have the magic bullet (yet) on how to solve it completely, this post is more on why you get it and how you can avoid seeing it too often.

For the fifth (if I recall correctly) year in a row I’m proud to present that I will speak at the annual SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2013 conference, September 30th to October 2nd. This year Office 365 MVP Göran Husman not only managed to bring some of the top-notch speakers around SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 to the conference, he also convinced them all to dress up in sailor suits and have the conference on a cruise ship between Stockholm, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at TechEd in New Zealand the 10-13th of September. This is really cool and my first trip down to Kiwi land. TechEd is a conference for all Microsoft technologies, not only SharePoint, but the lineup of SharePoint speakers and sessions at this conference just looks awesome; Dr. Search aka Neil Hodgkinson, MCA Wayne Ewington, MVP Mark Rhodes, MVP Debbie Ireland amongst others. If you live in the southern hemisphere and are just remotely interested in SharePoint you need to get your ticket ASAP!

Introduction I frequently see one specific question asked on distribution lists, Twitter, Yammer and other social networks: “How do I install Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) on the same machine as SharePoint 2013”, very frequently also followed by “any hacks accepted”. Those who have tried have noticed that there is a hard block – SharePoint cannot be installed on an Office Web Apps machine and Office Web Apps cannot be installed on a SharePoint machine. This is purely by design and I will in this post show you why and why you shouldn’t try to hack it.

Here goes a post in the middle of the summer, directly taken from yet another e-mail conversation with information that I thought was well known. It has been blogged before, but perhaps you readers (thanks mum and the other one) don’t follow those blogs, so here we go. Introduction Who doesn’t like Excel? Most people love it so much that they can’t get enough of it and uploads the Excel files to SharePoint and view and edit them using Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC). The web view and editing can be very beneficial on slow networks, on machines and devices without any decent Office edition or just as nice widgets on your dashboards.

Introduction This is a follow-up post on the SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps 2013 and Excel files with Data Connections post that I previously wrote. That post talked about how you needed to do, so called, WOPI Suppressions if you had Excel files with Data Connections and had those data connections configured to use the authenticated users account. The WOPI Suppression made sure that the rendering of the Excel book was done by Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 rather than with Office Web Apps 2013.

As you might have noticed I have somewhat fallen in love with Office Web Apps 2013, or WAC as we say now that we’ve gotten this close to each other. It’s an amazingly well written server product with the good side benefit that it is also very usable for the end-users. Even though me and WAC has been hanging around for a while and by now know each other pretty well, WAC has constantly been reporting that it is Unhealthy. And from what I’ve seen, heard and experienced in the field I am not alone…