Why you should use Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013 ~ Blog moved to www.jasperoosterveld.com

The Office Web Apps (OWA) were introduced with the release of SharePoint 2010. I immediately loved this new feature. By using the OWA every user can open and edit Office documents in the browser without the need of a local Office installation. This solves the issue of some users having a different Office version or no local Office client at all.

Opening Office documents in the browser is a lot faster then waiting for the local client to open. Another great feature was co-authoring. You are able to work together, in the same Office document, with multiple users. A really cool and useful feature.

I actually got the inspiration for this blog through SPYam. A member asked what she would miss if she didn't installed the OWA. I wrote a blog about the new Office Web Apps (Technical Preview) before so this is the follow-up. The previous blog has a nice overview of the new OWA features but it doesn't stop there. Let's take a look at some other really important and useful features.

Search results preview

I love the new SharePoint 2013 Search feature! It's really cool. I wrote a blog about the new Search features but for now let's focus at the OWA. By installing OWA you get an Office document preview in your search results. I really like the PowerPoint preview. You can view the whole presentation and even see all the animations.

Preview

The document preview also works in document libraries:

Just as the PowerPoint preview in the search results you can preview Office documents in document libraries. You have the ability to zoom by double clicking in the preview window. Pretty cool! By using this feature you can determine a lot faster if this is the document you are looking for. This prevents you from opening the document locally, waiting for it to open, and find it this is not the document you want. This will save you a lot of time.

OWA Server

In SharePoint 2010 the OWA were installed as Service Applications. This changed for SharePoint 2013 were OWA needs a dedicated server. The advantage of this change is the ability to use the OWA for other applications such as Exchange and Lync.

I really hope you can see the value of the OWA and find the resources to install a OWA server. Your users will really benefit from the amazing OWA features.