Office Web Apps is the online companion to Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote applications. It enables users, regardless of location, to view and edit documents. Office Web Apps gives users a browser-based viewing and editing experience by providing a representation of an Office document in the browser. When a user selects an Office document that is stored in a SharePoint document library or on SkyDrive, the document opens directly in the browser. The document appears in the browser similar to how it appears in the Office client application and provides many of the same editing features. When an Office Web App user selects the Edit in Word , Edit in Excel , Edit in PowerPoint , or Edit in OneNote button on the toolbar, the document opens in the associated Office client application if it is installed on the client computer.

Office Web Apps is available to consumers and businesses through:

• SharePoint Online and Office 365    Office Web Apps is one of several cloud services that are offered by Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises. You can learn more on the Office 365 Office Web Apps page and in the Office Web Apps Service Description.

• SkyDrive    SkyDrive provides Office Web Apps as a free service for consumers and small-business users. You can learn more by visiting Using Office Web Apps in Windows Live.

• On-premises in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010    Business customers who are licensed for Microsoft Office 2010 through a Volume Licensing program can run Office Web Apps on a server that runs Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. These customers can download Office Web Apps from the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center

• On-premises in Office 2013    An updated version of Office Web Apps, is available for business customers who are testing Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, Exchange Server 2013, and Lync Server 2013. You can download the new Office Web Apps with Office Web Apps Server from the Microsoft Download Center. The features in the new Office Web Apps available with Office Web Apps Server will eventually be available through SharePoint Online, Office 365 and SkyDrive.

We encourage business customers who need Office Web Apps functionality for their users to consider a SharePoint Online or Office 365 subscription that includes Office Web Apps. Subscribers to Office Web Apps benefit from a set of features that are common to all Microsoft business-class cloud services. Each service is designed for reliability, availability, and performance and has a financially backed service level agreement (SLA) for guaranteed 99.9-percent scheduled uptime. Microsoft deploys software updates, security updates, and back end upgrades, which helps eliminate the work organizations spend managing their servers.

Business customers who require Office Web Apps on-premises can deploy Office Web Apps Server on dedicated physical or virtual machine instances to provide Office Web Apps functionality to SharePoint 2013, Exchange Server 2013, and Lync Server 2013.

Users who work with Office files in document libraries in SharePoint 2013 can benefit from some new features highlighted in the following tables.

What’s new in Office Web Apps

Note:
PowerPoint Broadcast is removed from SharePoint 2013. It is available through SkyDrive and Lync Server 2013.

What’s new in Office Mobile Viewers

You can learn more about how to use mobile devices with SharePoint 2013 in Overview of mobile devices and SharePoint Server 2013. To learn more about how to use Office Mobile Viewers on your mobile device, see Use Office Web Apps on your Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone.

When used together with SharePoint Server 2013, Office Web Apps Server provides updated versions of Word Web App, Excel Web App, PowerPoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. Users can view and, in some cases, edit Office documents in SharePoint libraries by using a supported web browser on computers and on many mobile devices, such as Windows Phones, iPhones, iPads, Windows 8 tablets, and Android devices. Among the many improvements in Office Web Apps, improved touch support and editing capabilities enable users of iPads and Windows 8 tablets to enjoy editing and viewing Office documents directly from their devices.

Figure: The viewing and editing capabilities of Office Web Apps on different kinds of devices.

Office Web Apps licensing offers two options:

• View-only . By default, Office Web Apps is view-only. View-only functionality is provided for free.

• Edit and view . You must purchase an editing license to use the editing features of Office Web Apps with SharePoint 2013. You enable editing when you create the Office Web Apps Server farm.

Enterprise customers who are licensed for Office 2013 through a Volume Licensing program can enable Office Web Apps editing for SharePoint 2013 on-premises. This helps make sure that users have Office editing capabilities at home or in other locations where Office clients might not be installed. Editing licenses for Office Web Apps are not available for separate purchase.

For exact details about your license, refer to the Microsoft Software License Terms that is shown when you install Office Web Apps Server.

SharePoint 2013 provides new license enforcement that works with Office Web Apps. If you enable SharePoint licensing and then enable Office Web Apps editing, only the users who have the appropriate license can actually edit Office files in a browser. If no Office Web Apps editing licenses are applied for users, only viewing is supported. For more information about how licensing works in SharePoint 2013, see Configure licensing in SharePoint Server 2013. The EditingEnabled parameter that enables editing is described in New-OfficeWebAppsFarm and Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm.

Files that are sent by the Share by link feature in SharePoint 2013 can be edited in Office Web Apps even when no editing license is present and when editing is disabled for the Office Web Apps Server farm.

When Office Web Apps is installed on SharePoint Server 2010, Office Mobile Viewers are also installed on the SharePoint Server. Office Mobile Viewers enable users to open documents in their smartphone’s web browser. However, with SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps is no longer a companion product installed on a SharePoint Server. Instead, Office Web Apps Server is a new stand-alone server product that delivers Office Web Apps functionality on your private network. Although these are now separate products, Office Web Apps Server continues to enable Office Mobile Viewers to make them available to mobile users who access SharePoint sites.

The SharePoint site administrator can control whether Office Mobile Viewers are enabled for users on the organization’s SharePoint site. By default, Office Mobile Viewers are enabled. Users can navigate to the SharePoint site by using the mobile browser on their mobile device, tap the document that they want to open in the SharePoint library, and the document will open in the mobile browser. For more information about how to access SharePoint libraries on mobile devices, see What's new for mobile devices in SharePoint 2013 and Overview of mobile devices and SharePoint Server 2013. To disable Office Mobile Viewers on SharePoint 2013, see Remove-SPWOPIBinding. To learn more about how to use Office Mobile Viewers on your mobile device, see Use Office Web Apps on your Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone.

Excel Services is technology that enables you to view and interact with a workbook in a browser window similar to how you would use Excel on your computer. Excel uses a built-in calculation engine to connect to external data and render the results of formulas and queries. Excel Services uses server technology to provide similar functionality in a browser window. Excel Services was introduced in Office SharePoint Server 2007. In SharePoint Server 2013, Excel Services is available only in the Enterprise edition.

Excel Services technology is available in Office Web Apps Server as Excel Web App, and in SharePoint as Excel Services. Excel Web App and Excel Services in SharePoint have a lot in common, but they are not the same. Both applications enable you to view workbooks in a browser window, and both enable you to interact with and explore data. However, there are certain differences between Excel Web App and Excel Services in SharePoint. Excel Services supports external data connections, data models, and the ability to interact with items that use data models (such as PivotChart reports, PivotTable reports and timeline controls). Excel Web App enables users to view and interact with workbooks, but Excel Web App does not support external data connections or the ability to interact with reports and timeline controls that use data models. Excel Services provides more business intelligence functionality than Excel Web App, but Excel Services does not enable users to create or edit workbooks in a browser window.

Excel Services is available only in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2013. Excel Web App is available in SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Foundation 2013. To see the list of differences between the Excel Web App and Excel Services, see Overview of Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013 and Comparing Excel Services in SharePoint to Excel Web App.

If your organization decides to use Excel Services instead of Excel Web App to view workbooks in the browser, you can use the Windows PowerShell New-SPWOPISuppressionSettings cmdlet to turn off Excel Web App for Excel workbooks. For more information, see New-SPWOPISuppressionSetting.

Configuring Office Web Apps for SharePoint 2013 is a fairly simple process. The following video shows how to set up Office Web Apps Server and configure SharePoint 2013 to use Office Web Apps Server in a test environment.

Watch the "Configuring Office Web Apps for SharePoint 2013" video.

This video covers procedures that are performed on two servers: the server that runs Office Web Apps Server, and the server that runs SharePoint 2013. Remember that these must always be separate servers as described in Software, hardware, and configuration requirements for Office Web Apps Server.

On the server that runs Office Web Apps Server, the video shows how to:

1. Open the Windows PowerShell command prompt and install the required roles and services for Office Web Apps Server. See Prepare servers to run Office Web Apps Server. This is necessary because Office Web Apps Server will not install if the required roles and services are missing.
2. Install Office Web Apps Server software from the Microsoft Download Center.
3. Create the Office Web Apps Server farm by using New-OfficeWebAppsFarm.
4. Verify that the Office Web Apps Server farm was created successfully by opening a browser window and going to http:// ServerName /hosting/discovery.

On the server that runs SharePoint 2013, the video shows how to:

5. Open the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell.
6. Create the binding between Office Web Apps Server and SharePoint 2013 by using New-SPWOPIBinding. This sets up communication between the server that runs SharePoint 2013 and the server that runs Office Web Apps Server.
7. View the WOPI zone of SharePoint 2013 by using Get-SPWOPIZone. This step highlights the fact that the two servers are using different WOPI zones: SharePoint 2013 is using internal-https, and Office Web Apps Server is using internal-http. The zone must match for Office Web Apps to work correctly.
8. Change the WOPI zone for SharePoint 2013 by using Set-SPWOPIZone to change the WOPI zone to internal-http.
9. Verify that Office Web Apps is working by opening an Office document in a SharePoint 2013 document library.

For more detail about each of these steps, see the following sections in the articles Deploy Office Web Apps Server and Configure SharePoint 2013 to use Office Web Apps.

• Prepare servers to run Office Web Apps Server

• Deploy a single-server Office Web Apps Server farm in a test environment

• Prepare to configure SharePoint 2013 to use Office Web Apps Server

• Configure SharePoint 2013 to use Office Web Apps Server in a test environment that uses HTTP