Install & Configure Office Online Server

In this article, we will have a look at installing and configuring Office Online Server for Exchange 2016, Skype for Business and Sharepoint server.

Office Online server is released last week.The OOS is available for download only at the Volume License Servicing Center. To use the full feature of the office online server we need to have on-premise Office Suite license or Office 365 Pro Plus subscription

The Office Online server can be found at the below location when logged in the VLSC portal account and can be downloaded.

VLSC -> Search for “Office Professional Plus 2016 ” -> Click download -> Now you can see oos download.

Prerequisites:

System Requirements:

This office online server needs to be installed on a separate Windows 2012 R2 Server. Better to have this server on the same subnet where we have the dependent applications (Exchange, Skype for Business and Sharepoint). No other applications should be dependent on this server and should be dedicated only for Office Online Server.

Software requirements:

Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2
Operating system feature is required
Install-WindowsFeature Web-Server, Web-Mgmt-Tools, Web-Mgmt-Console, Web-WebServer, Web-Common-Http, Web-Default-Doc, Web-Static-Content, Web-Performance, Web-Stat-Compression, Web-Dyn-Compression, Web-Security, Web-Filtering, Web-Windows-Auth, Web-App-Dev, Web-Net-Ext45, Web-Asp-Net45, Web-ISAPI-Ext, Web-ISAPI-Filter, Web-Includes, InkandHandwritingServices

All available Windows Updates to be installed

It requires the Windows Identity Foundation feature to be installed.

Certificate Requirements:

It basically requires two URLs similar we required for Office web apps server in the earlier version.

It requires two certificates - one internal to trust the connections coming from the internal URL and one external to trust the connections coming from the external outside the firewall.

The internal certificate can be generated from the internal CA and imported to the local store root of the OOS server.

The external certificate can be generated from a trusted third-party CA and then installed on the reverse proxy server.

Network configuration:

We need to create the internal URL and the external URL on the DNS for the office web apps to work.

So for the internal URL we need to create a DNS record for the decided URL pointing to the OOS server.

Similarly, the external URL needs to be published on port 443 on a public IP so that the external requests will reach the OOS server via reverse proxy.

Enable client affinity and SSL offloading for this OOS requests on the load balancer.

Similarly, we need to ensure that the DNS resolution happens between the OOS server and the application (Exchange, Skype for Business and Sharepoint) so that the rendering will happen successfully.

Installation:

The installation is pretty simple and straight forward and has no complex configurations. All we need to do is to run the downloaded setup with the default values.

Configure the certificate, DNS, and network configurations before we install the setup which will make our job simpler.

Post installation we need to open the PowerShell in elevated mode and run the below command to configure the URLs.

Command for Same internal and external URL (which is better):

New-OfficeWebAppsFarm -InternalURL https://oos.domain.com -ExternalURL https://oos.domain.com -CertificateName “OOS certificate”

After running the above command we can run the below command:

**Get-OfficeWebAppsFarm **

Below are the new properties available:

https://exchangequery.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/oos.png?w=600

Also, we can see the below app pools are created on the OOS server after installation.

Basically, we can see Excel, PowerPoint, Word and few more pools.

https://exchangequery.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/oos1.png?w=891

These app pools function in the background to provide a rich user interface to preview and modify the attachment online through OWA, Sharepoint intranet/internet sites and sharing presentations during the Skype conferences. The reason to use this is that Microsoft has outsourced the rendering of PowerPoints etc. to the Office online Server. So this can be used as a one server to server online document rendering for these three Microsoft applications.

This will help end users in watching PowerPoints in Skype conferences from a desktop web browser and view modify MS office documents in Exchange, SharePoint even though the MS Office is not installed on that computer.

We can also verify if the farm is installed correctly by navigation to the below URL:

http://servername/hosting/discovery

The response should be the below.

https://exchangequery.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/ooo.jpg?w=891

Now we will have a look at configuring OOS endpoints on Exchange, Skype for Business and Sharepoint.

Configure OOS server for Exchange 2016:

We can option to configure the Office online server on the organizational level and the mailbox server level. So we can decide according to the requirement. This has to be decided based on the Exchange versions that are running on the environment and DR setup.

Below is the command for configuring the OOS for mailbox level.

Set-MailboxServer servername -WacDiscoveryEndpoint “https://oos.internal.domain.com/hosting/discovery”

Below is the  command for configuring the OOS for Organizational level.

Set-OrganizationConfig -WacDiscoveryEndpoint “https://oos.internal.domain.com/hosting/discovery”

For Skype for Business:

Just use the FQDN published under “InternalURL” when configuring Office Web Apps Server through the Topology Builder.

Here we need to specify the OOS FQDN and the URL alone.

https://exchangequery.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/321.png?w=600

Once we publish this on the SFB then we are done with this part.

For Sharepoint:

Run the below commands:

New-SPWOPIBinding -ServerName “oos.domain.com”
 
Set-SPWOPIZone –zone “external-https”
 
$config = (get-spsecuritytokenserviceconfig)
$config.allowoauthoverhttp = $true
$config.update()

Hope this helps.