WAC Server

Introduction This is a story from the trenches where Excel Web App in Office Web Apps 2013 refuses to render Excel documents, while other Apps such as Word and PowerPoint works just fine. The end-users are met with the generic error message: “We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request.” The problem is easy to solve but can be somewhat difficult to locate and in this post I will show you how to find the issue and fix it.

If you have been working with SharePoint you should know by now how to get the build version of an installation using PowerShell. Knowing the version of the installation is crucial for troubleshooting and knowing what features or limitations the current installation has, given the new release cadence. If you don’t know how to do it then Bing for it and then return here. But how do you do the same for Office Web Apps Server 2013?

With this new wave of SharePoint, the Office Web Apps Server (WAC – I don’t like the OWA acronym, that’s something else in my opinion) is its own server product, implementing the WOPI client protocol, which allows a client to retrieve documents from SharePoint on the behalf of the user. Documents will flow from the WOPI servers (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange etc.) to the Office Web Apps Server – this means that potentially confidential information will be transferred from the SharePoint environment and stored/cached on another server. This could result in unnecessary information leakage and compromise the enterprise security.

Well, I thought I should write another episode of my Building your own WOPI Client series, here’s the links to the previous episodes part 1, part 2 and part 3. This time around we’ll dig into another of the different actions that a WOPI Client can surface – the interactivepreview mode. Background As you’ve seen in the previous posts we can build a viewer and an editor for C# files, to be used in document libraries for instance. What if we would like to lift up and enhance our custom file formats in search, just like Office Web Apps Server does with the Office files. We’ll you can do that very easy, and you should! In this post I’ll show you how to surface the preview mode in a Search flyout. This also means that we’re going to take a look at the new SharePoint 2013 Search Engine, the Design Manager and some funky HTML syntax.

This is part three (and counting) of my Building your own WOPI Client series. In part 1 I discussed the WOPI Protocol and especially how to implement the Discovery process of a WOPI Client. In part 2 we built a viewer application as a WOPI Client and connected it to SharePoint. In this part we’re modifying our WOPI Client to support basic editing of the files. Modyfing the WOPI Client Discovery data The first thing that we need to do is to modify our Discovery method, in our case the static XML file, to tell the WOPI Server that we support editing of the files. It’s a simple procedure and we just add another line of XML like this to the app element:

Welcome back to another part in my Building a WOPI Client series. In the previous and first post I walked you through the basics of the WOPI protocol, how the WOPI Discovery mechanism worked and how to implement it and finally how to register a WOPI Client with SharePoint 2013 as WOPI Server. In this post we’ll continue to build on our C# Viewer and now actually add the viewer – we ended the last post quite dull with just showing a simple Hello WOPI web page which we now are going to turn into a real C# viewer.

Hi friends, finally time for some posts with some real code samples, and not some silly scripts. In this post, and a couple of follow up posts, I will walk you through the basics behind the WOPI protocol and WOPI Apps and WOPI Hosts. In the end you will see how we can create our own viewers and editors for files just like the WAC Server 2013 can view and edit Microsoft Office files in SharePoint 2013.