PREPARING THE SERVER AND INSTALLING OWA VIA THE GUI

As noted earlier, the evolution and expansion of OWA has changed the installation procedures greatly from the previous version. The first step to any OWA install is to prepare and configure the server. OWA has very strict requirements about how and where it should be installed. You cannot have any other Microsoft server-level software installed on the same machine. That includes the following:

• Exchange Server
• SharePoint Server
• Lync Server
• SQL Server
• No version of the desktop Office suite may be installed on the OWA server(s).

As you might suspect, because each Office Web Apps server has so many great services to offer, it requires its own Windows server with the proper hardware requirements:

Operating System Requirements

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or later
• Windows Server 2012 RTM or later

Hardware Requirements

• 8GB RAM
• 4-core processor
• 80GB hard disk space

Installing Prerequisites for Windows Server 2012

If you are installing on Windows Server 2012, then you need to configure the following specific roles and services:

1. Your install account must be a local administrator on the Office Web Apps server. In this example, set contoso\sp_install as a local administrator of the server and then remote desktop to the server as that account.

2. Open your Windows 2012 Server Manager Dashboard and from the left-hand menu select Local Server.

3. Select Manage on the top-right menu bar, and select Add Roles and Features from the drop-down menu. The Add Roles and Features Wizard will appear. Click Next.

4. Select “Role-based or feature-based installation” in the second screen of the Add Roles and Features Wizard and click Next.

5. Select the local server onto which you will be installing the new roles and features. In this example it is owa.contoso.com. Click Next.

6. Check the Web Server (IIS) role, which will invoke the window shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1

7. From the window select the Add Features button. This will install the necessary IIS role and IIS management console. Back on the screen, select Web Server (IIS) and click Next.

8. From the list of Features select the Ink and Handwriting Services and click Next.

9. On the Web Server Role (IIS) screen with lots of boring text click Next.

10. In the Web Server Role (IIS) role services dialog, ensure that the proper settings are selected:

• In the Common HTTP Features section, both Default Document and Static Content options should be checked by default.
• Select Dynamic Content Compression under the Performance section. In that same section also confirm that the default Static Content Compression is selected.
• Scroll down to the Security section and select Windows Authentication. In that same section also confirm that the default Request Filtering is selected.

11. Expand the Application Development section. Check the box for .NET extensibility 4.5, which will invoke the window shown in Figure 2. From the window click Add Features.

FIGURE 2

12. Check ASP.NET 4.5, which will invoke the window shown in Figure 3. From the window, click Add Features.

FIGURE 3

13. Scroll down a little and check Server Side Includes. That will do it. To continue, click Next at the bottom of the window.

14. Click Install to confirm adding the roles and features.

When the installation completes you may or may not be prompted to reboot depending on the mood of the server. If it asks you to reboot, please do so before continuing. With all of this done you have the prerequisites in place and you are ready to install the Office Web Apps.

Installing Prerequisites for Windows 2008 R2

Installing on Windows 2008 R2 is possible if that is your only option. To install on old faithful, keep a few things in mind. Windows Server 2008 R2 must be patched to Service Pack 1 or later, plus all Windows updates. You also need to manually download and install .NET Framework 4.5, Windows PowerShell 3.0, and KB259525. Once you have all those pieces, you then need to add similar roles and features as you would for Windows Server 2012. To avoid clicking through multiple pages, you can do it with PowerShell:

Import-Module ServerManager

Add-WindowsFeature Web-Server,Web-WebServer,Web-Common-Http,Web-Static-Content,
Web-App-Dev,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Net-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,
Web-Includes,Web-Security,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Filtering,Web-Stat-Compression,
Web-Dyn-Compression,Web-Mgmt-Console,Ink-Handwriting,IH-Ink-Support

That covers the prerequisites for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Installing Office Web Apps

After completing the requisite configuration on the server and rebooting if you were prompted, you can install the OWA software:

This completes the install of the Office Web Apps software to a single server. The following sections outline configuring this server using either the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. If you ever need to add additional Office Web Apps servers to the farm, just follow the preceding steps to prepare it for configuration.