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To me, Office Web Apps is one of the coolest things to happen to SharePoint in a long time. Users can now view and edit their Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint documents without ever leaving the browser. Of course this doesn’t get you off the hook for licensing. The end user stills need an Office CAL for the product they are using but for ease of use and access to your documents it can’t be beat. Imagine this scenario. You upload a big Excel document to your SharePoint site and go home. Someone calls you and says there is an error that needs to be fixed right away. You just pop out your iPad, navigate to your site, and edit the data right there and save. All you need to do is install Office Web Apps on your SharePoint 2010 Server.

Installing it

You need to install Office Web Apps on your SharePoint Server. This will create features and service applications. Office Web Apps features need to be turned on at the site collection level. You will need to run the SharePoint Products and Technology Configuration Wizard. If you have a lot of site collections (i.e. My Sites) you can use the following PowerShell command to turn on the Office Web App feature (replace <URL of top site> with your top level site collection)

Get-SPSite –Limit ALL –WebApplication <URL of top site> |%{Enable-SPFeature OfficeWebApps –url $_.Url}

Troubleshooting tips

If you get an error when trying to edit word files in the browser make sure you have a Word Viewing Service (and the proxy) service application created. If not then go to http://<centraladmin url>/_admin/ServiceApplications.aspx and click new. It should show up if you have installed Office Web Apps.

PowerPoint might also need to have a service application created.

Find out more at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/and at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431687.aspx

Also it is free to use on Sky Drive now.