This is related to a previous post – Embedding PDFs in SharePoint.

Since showing how to embed PDF documents into SharePoint web pages, a few people have been asking how to do the same with Office documents. The answer depends on what version of SharePoint and Office you are using (and licensed for). Here are some of the different methods possible

Please note that Microsoft may not agree with or support some of these methods or opinions.

Using Office Web Apps on Windows Live

Office Web Apps is available for use as part of Windows Live Skydrive. You get up to 25Gb of storage and it includes the use of Office Web Apps. You can upload and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and choose to keep them private, share them with a limited audience or share them with everyone.

• Login to Windows Live Skydrive
• Upload or create your spreadsheet (don’t forget to set access permissions)
• If not already open, select Edit in browser to open the spreadsheet
• Click on the File menu and select Properties
• From within the Properties page, copy the Embed code
• In SharePoint, add a Content Editor web part to the page and paste in the Embed code

Note: you have to use the Content Editor web part when embedding iFrames (which is what Office Web Apps uses). If you try inserting direct into the page, the HTML editor will automatically strip out the embed tags. If you are using SharePoint 2003 or 2007, modify the web part and make sure you click the Source Code button, not the Rich Text Editor button.

Using Office Web Apps as part of Office 365 (includes SharePoint Online)

Currently in beta, not yet publicly available. Details will be updated here when it is… The current versions of SharePoint Online run SharePoint 2007.

Using Office Web Apps integrated with SharePoint 2010

OK, here comes the bad news… the Office Web Apps that comes integrated with SharePoint 2010 has reduced functionality compared to Office Web Apps that is provided for free with Windows Live. You can view/edit the same types of documents in the browser, but the File menu does not include a Properties section and there is no obvious way to get the required embed code. This means you can’t easily embed the files in web pages except for where specific web parts have been provided, i.e. Excel Web Access and Visio Web Access. Those two require SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition.

So, to use Office Web Apps with SharePoint you need:

• A volume licensing agreement for Office 2010 covering all users, regardless of whether or not they will use the full client version or Office Web Apps
• Office Web Apps will integrate with all versions of SharePoint 2010, including Foundation Service (provided as part of the Windows Server license)
• To embed Excel or Visio files into SharePoint web pages using their respective web parts, you will need to be licensed for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition
• You cannot embed Word or PowerPoint files into web pages without jumping through additional hoops like using Flash or Silverlight

The other frustration is that you cannot create new documents using Office Web Apps integrated in SharePoint 2010 if you have Office installed on your computer. There is no New button from within the Office Web Apps interface in SharePoint. To create a new document, you have to click New from within the SharePoint library and it will automatically launch the full client if it detects Office is installed. This is annoying for all the clients deploying SharePoint 2010 but delaying upgrading Office on the desktop. And whilst moaning… given the thumper licensing requirement, I’m surprised the user interface doesn’t display metadata properties anywhere. You have to return to the document library to edit them. Disappointing.

In short, Office Web Apps integrated into SharePoint could do better, like at least offer the same level of functionality provided by the free version integrated with Windows Live…

Using Excel Web Access with SharePoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 introduced Excel Web Access which made it easy to embed spreadsheets in web pages. For details on how to do it, including notes about some feature limitations, read Excel Web Access 101 (link at the end of this post).

Using Office Web Components

Note the subtle change in title – we are now talking about Office Web Components (OWC) not Office Web Access (OWA).

Office web components were first released with Office 2000 (I think) and were discontinued after Office 2003 having been replaced by Excel Services in SharePoint and now Office Web Access. They enabled you to embed Excel spreadsheets, pivot tables and charts into web pages. They are ActiveX controls which means using them can carry a pretty big security risk. Microsoft would not recommend or support using them.

Note the health warnings listed under Potential Issues. This is not a recommended solution. But if you’re determined to embed a spreadsheet one way or another and don’t have SharePoint 2007/10 Enterprise Edition or can’t use Office Web Apps on Windows Live, you could give it a try… Links on what needs to be done are at the end of the post. But what’s most interesting is that Office Web Components are still installed by default. They’re on my SharePoint demo machine, have no idea whether it was Office or SharePoint that included them in the installation. I’ll try and remember to check on the next build.

So there you have it, a few different ways for embedding Office documents in SharePoint web pages using tools provided with SharePoint and Office. None of them as easy as they should be (i.e. a certain other vendor and plenty of third parties offer easier methods). I’m guessing improvements will appear at some point in the not too distant future.

References

• Windows Live Skydrive
• Customise how Excel is embedded – useful reference for changing how your embedded spreadsheet behaves
• What happened to Office Web Components – blog post by Joel Oleson, Jan 2007
• How to manually install Office Web Components on SharePoint Server 2007 – blog post by Shane Young, Sept 2006

Related Posts

• Embedding PDFs in SharePoint
• SharePoint and Office web apps
• Excel Web Access 101 (SharePoint 2007)

Random other gripes about Office and SharePoint too short to write a separate post about:

• Office Web Apps seem to be able to ignore mandatory columns. If you set a column to mandatory, then open a document using ‘Edit in browser’, it will happily save changes without prompting you to fill in any metadata. Office will not and neither will SharePoint if you go to edit the properties in the document library. Interestingly, whilst testing I couldn’t then open the file in Excel as it had corrupted. Will be doing some more tests…
• Prepare to be frustrated with the new managed metadata service if you’re not deploying Office 2010 on the desktop. You can’t edit the columns from within Office 2007 and you can’t bulk edit them in datasheet view in SharePoint either. But they are oh so useful as search refiners that you won’t want to not use them.

This post was original posted on Joining Dots

A few years ago, I published an infographic showing the history of SharePoint, to help decypher the different twists, turns and acquisitions that influenced what went into (and out of) SharePoint. (May get round to doing an update on that sometime…)

A related product has also had a few twists and turns of its own – PerformancePoint. The clue is in the name, it’s in the same family of products as SharePoint and originally targeted performance management solutions. Here’s its life story so far…

Back in 2001, business intelligence and performance management were quite hot topics but became overshadowed by the rise of the portal. An early market leader was ProClarity and most people thought Microsoft would acquire it. Instead they purchased Data Analyzer, owned by a ProClarity partner.In the same year, Microsoft acquired Great Plains, a provider of business applications to small and medium-sized organisations. Included with the acquisition was FRx Forecaster which had been acquired by Great Plains the previous year.

Data Analyzer remained available as a desktop product for a while before disappearing. Some of the technology merged into what would become Microsoft’s first performance management server product: Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (BSM – naturally, not to be confused with the British School of Motoring if you’re reading this in the UK )

BSM enabled you to define key performance indicators (KPIs) and then create scorecards and dashboards to monitor and analyse performance against targets. The product included web parts that could display those KPIs, scorecards and dashboards on a SharePoint site. It even had a little bit of Visio integration producing strategy maps (a key component of an effective business scorecard).  BSM was a classic v1 product: difficult to install, basic capabilities and limited adoption by organisations.

In 2006, Microsoft finally acquired the company it should have bought in the first place – ProClarity, which had a desktop and server product. The products were available standalone and some of the technology integrated into the replacement for BSM – PerformancePoint Server 2007 (PPS). Also integrated into PPS was a new forecasting capability based on the FRx Forecaster

PPS was effectively two products – a Monitoring Server and a Planning Server. The Monitoring Server included a revamped Dashboard Designer with improvements to the core monitoring and analysis capabilities – KPIs, reports, scorecards and dashboards. It also leveraged corresponding web parts available in SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. The Planning Server included a new Planning Business Modeler that enabled multiple data sources to be mapped and used to plan, budget and forecast expected performance. The Planning Server proved particularly problematic to configure and use…

In 2009, Microsoft announced that PerformancePoint Server was being discontinued. The Monitoring Server elements were to be merged into future releases of SharePoint (and anyone licensed for SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition was immediately given access to PerformancePoint Server 2007 as part of that license). The source code for the Planning Server elements was released under restricted license as a Financial Planning Accelerator, ending its life within Microsoft. The FRx technology returned to the Dynamics product range.

In 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 was released and the Enterprise Edition includes the new PerformancePoint Service complete with dashboard and scorecarding capabilities but no planning options. This year also saw the release of Management Reporter which offers both monitoring and planning capabilities with direct integration into the various Dynamics products. And a new BI tool was released – PowerPivot for Excel, an add-in that enables you to create pivot tables and visualisations based on very large data sets. A trend worth keeping an eye on…

Going forward, Microsoft has business intelligence and performance management solutions in two camps: the Office and SharePoint platform that can provide a front-end to business applications and data sources of all shapes and sizes; and the Dynamics Product range that provides end-to-end business applications for small- to medium-sized organisations (and divisions within larger organisations). Dynamics can also leverage SharePoint as its front-end, just like any other business application.

SQL Server continues to provide the core foundation for all data-driven solutions – offering its own database capabilities as well as warehousing and integration with other ODBC-compliant data sources plus the reporting and analysis services on which BI solutions are built. SharePoint provides the web front-end for information and data-driven solutions amongst other things, like search, collaboration etc… Office continues to provide desktop tools as well as web-based versions that integrate with SharePoint. Excel now has its sidekick PowerPivot (wish they’d named that one PivotPoint…), Visio continues to be, well, Visio – one of the few acquisitions to keep its original name intact. And also worth a mention are Bing Maps and MapPoint, which provide location-specific visualisations. I originally wrote that MapPoint was discontinued. But did a search to check when it stopped being available only to find it alive and well as MapPoint 2010… hey ho!

You’d be right to think this performance management roadmap has looked a little rocky. What’s interesting to note is there is a Corporate Performance Management team within the Dynamics group, whilst Business Intelligence messaging barely mentions it, focusing instead on subsets of performance management – reporting and analysis.

If you are a performance management purist, you will likely be disappointed with the capabilities offered by PerformancePoint, much in the same way a taxonomy purist will gripe at the limitations within ManagedMetadata. Both are services within SharePoint 2010 that help manage and visualise information – they are part of a platform as opposed to specialist niche solutions that will typically offer a more comprehensive feature set. But if you want to start improving how everyone interacts with information and data as part of daily decisions and activities, a platform is a pretty good place to begin, requiring less skills or resources to get started.

Final note: All the above comments are based on my own opinions and observations. They do not represent any Microsoft official statements from the past, present or future Have to mention on this sort of post as it covers the period of time I worked at Microsoft.

References

• Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) web site
• PerformancePoint Services team blog
• Dynamics Corporate Performance Management (CPM) team blog
• MapPoint web site (only BI-related product that doesn’t get a mention on the BI web site)
• New features in PerformancePoint Services 2010 – blog post by PPS team
• Management Reporter: What’s next – roadmap into 2012+ (more planning planned)
• Microsoft shutters PerformancePoint and Planning Server gets an extension – RedmondMag

Related blog posts

• SharePoint History and Infographic (August 2006)
• Installing Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (March 2006)

With the release of SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 earlier this year, a new set of applications also arrived – Office Web Applications. Office Web Apps are browser-based versions of Office, enabling you to create, view and edit presentations, spreadsheets and documents using just a web browser.

Two questions keep coming up in SharePoint conversations with clients – What’s the licensing for Office Web Apps? Can I create documents using just Office Web Apps with SharePoint or do I still need Office to be installed?

The short answers are: licensing is complicated; yes you can create documents using Office Web Apps within SharePoint and no you don’t need Office to be installed (in fact, you can only create new documents using Office Web Apps when you don’t have Office installed).

Here are the details and we’ll see if Microsoft disagrees…

Office Web Apps comes in two versions: consumer and business.

The consumer version of Office Web Apps is available for free online because it is supported by embedded advertising, similar to using Google’s various free online apps such as Google Docs. You can create, view and edit documents without needing Office installed, you just need a browser. To use it, you will need a Windows Live account just as you need a Google account to use Google Docs. The documents are stored online using Windows Live Skydrive (formerly known as Office Live Workspace).

The business version of Office Web Apps is not free. In order to use it, each user must be licensed to use the full version of Office 2010. And it has to be a volume license, i.e. your organisation has a bulk volume license (or Enterprise Agreement – EA) to install Office. Office Web Apps are not included with retail or OEM versions of Office or with any previous version of Office. And every user who accesses documents using Office Web Apps must have a volume licenses to use Office, including third parties outside your organisation. As far as I can tell, this renders Office Web Apps an expensive option for extranets and public web sites given there are free and cheaper alternatives are available. It will also exclude small businesses who purchase Office either with new PCs (OEM) or full package (retail). And it will exclude organisations who have on-site customers who may want to access documents using a web browser. Schools and colleges, for example… if the normal policy is to expect non-employees to purchase their own computers and software to access documents held on your systems, you will need to buy licences to give them access via Office Web Apps. And don’t forget you’ll need SharePoint licences too if you are running SharePoint Server 2010 instead of SharePoint Foundation Services (the latter is included with Windows licensing)…

So, that’s the licensing side. If you’ve cleared that hurdle, on to using Office Web Apps within your organisation…

To use the business version of Office Web Apps, they are installed as an add-on to SharePoint 2010 <-yes, that means you need to deploy SharePoint 2010 to use Office Web Apps. You can access Office Web Apps within SharePoint from any browser-enabled device, you do not need to have Office installed. When Office Web Apps are configured, SharePoint will automatically open Office files in the browser by default. There is an icon to click if you want to edit a document. However there is no ‘New’ icon. Who knows why? The only way to create new documents using Office Web Apps on SharePoint 2010 is to click the ‘New Document’ icon from within a document library. If Office is installed, this action will launch the full client. If Office is not installed, this action will open a new document in Office Web Apps.

The official supported browsers for Office Web Apps include: Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Safari 4 on OS X, Firefox 3.5 on Windows, OS X or Linux. Other browsers may or may not work, e.g. mobile versions, they’re just not officially supported. Naturally, Microsoft being Microsoft, not all browsers are equal. Silverlight integration leads to a better ‘experience’ with Office Web Apps, such as using ClearType to improve the display of fonts.

If you are still reading and not confused, let’s correct that… there’s a third solution from Microsoft involving web access to documents – Docs.com. Docs is built on Office 2010 and Office Web Apps but is not from the Office or SharePoint teams. It has come out of Microsoft’s FUSE Labs. Docs includes integration with Facebook for creating and sharing documents with your Facebook friends. Docs is currently in beta so no news on licensing or integration with its related consumer and business siblings…

My closing thoughts

I’m disappointed but not surprised that Microsoft has made a prize mess of the licensing for Office Web Apps. In attempting to first and foremost protect their Office revenue stream, they’re proving the theory behind the Innovator’s Dilemma.

The licensing of Office Web Apps for business customers presents 3 choices:

1. Purchase/increase/maintain a volume licensing agreement to cover Office 2010 (and SharePoint 2010) for all users, employees and others, who want to access documents in a web browser using Office Web Apps.
2. Continue with the traditional methods – email documents or publish links to SharePoint libraries and people download/open the documents using any Office-compatible client installed on their computer. Naturally Office 2010 is the recommended client for integration with SharePoint.
3. Use alternative browser-based options for viewing/editing Office documents, such as Google Apps or Zoho. Evaluate the cost of the monthly subscription versus Microsoft’s licensing cost. You will also need to consider the cost/value/risk of introducing a different approach to collaboration and productivity applications. This option isn’t for integrating with Office and SharePoint. It replaces them.
4. There is a fourth option – use the free ad-funded consumer versions although those clouds are a little too grey for most organisations to fly into. Security, support and scale being the first three issues to overcome.
5. There’s also the fifth option – reduce your dependency on documents and publish more content direct into web/wiki pages… but maybe a blog post for another day

Focusing on the first three options, one may generate additional revenue for Microsoft, one will reduce revenue and none of the options are likely to increase customer satisfaction or loyalty. The first may prove too expensive to justify the benefits. The second ties Office to the desktop in an era when people want to access content from any browser-capable device. The third introduces a new approach to collaboration and productivity, one that doesn’t need SharePoint or Office (or even a PC)…

A better approach would have been to include the use of Office Web Apps within SharePoint licensing, which is complicated enough when it comes to external access so you may as well kill two birds with one stone. And including Office Web Apps may even help justify increased SharePoint licenses. Anyone who claims this will reduce Office revenue clearly hasn’t been using Office Web Apps, or at least not in the real world. Pushing organisations to try alternatives has far better odds.

Related blog posts:

• Rethinking Office: Comparing Office with Google Docs – April 2008
• Programming Office: Why the shift of apps to the cloud will be slow – May 2008

References:

• Understanding Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps – session at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, October 2009
• The twists and turns of Office Web Apps’ software license – Infoworld, February 2010
• Users will need a Microsoft Office licence to use Office Web Apps – ITWriting, May 2010
• Licensing of Office Web Apps when used with SharePoint 2010 – EduGeek Forum, June 2010
• The Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen
• Office Web Apps blog
• Windows Live Skydrive / Office Live Workspace
• Docs.com

One of the new features with SharePoint 2010 is the option to add-on FAST for advanced indexing and search capabilities. The short presentation below gives an idea of the extras you get with FAST versus just using SharePoint. The focus is on internal indexing/search solutions. FAST offers a lot more over SharePoint for use with public facing web sites but that’s a whole other scenario.

Microsoft has recently published a TechNet article containing an Overview for SharePoint Workspace 2010. SharePoint Workspace is the new name for Groove, which provides offline collaborative functionality for SharePoint with better synchronisation than is available within Outlook 2010.

Personally, I have been reluctant to encourage the use of Groove/Workspace within organisations unless they have very specific needs. It adds another layer of complexity to managing a SharePoint deployment and is another user interface for people to learn. A classic target scenario for using Groove is one where organisations need to co-create and collaborate on documents with a distributed workforce who aren’t always well-connected to the Internet (people can author offline and Groove synchronises with SharePoint in the background). Or for working beyond an organisation’s boundaries – Groove crosses firewalls better than SharePoint if you don’t have an extranet, although there are less complicated alternatives…

Whilst talking about new names, Windows SharePoint Services is also being rebranded SharePoint Foundation Service. So to give a summary of what goes with what SharePoint name:

I’ve had one client come away from a Microsoft event confused by hearing about over 8 different versions of SharePoint. Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST for more advanced enterprise search capabilities is being listed as part of the SharePoint range. And then there are products such as SharePoint Designer. Further adding to the confusion, there are two different types of licence available for each edition of SharePoint Server.

To keep it simple, think of SharePoint as serving three core scenarios:

1. Storing content and basic collaborative work: Use SharePoint Foundation Services
2. Finding and managing unstructured information (documents and web content), building social networks (personalisation and knowledge sharing): Use SharePoint Server Standard Edition
3. Integrating structured information (applications, data analysis, identity management/single sign-on): Use SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition

If you want advanced search capabilities, add FAST to any one of those three scenarios. If you want offline collaborative working, add SharePoint Workspace or Outlook (2007/2010). If you want to customise how SharePoint works, you’ll be using SharePoint Designer.

From a licensing perspective, SharePoint Foundation Service is included with Windows Server 2008. For SharePoint Server, both Standard and Enterprise, there is a choice between Intranet licensing (for internal use only) and Internet/Extranet licensing (for external use/public web sites). All the extras (FAST, Office etc.) have their own separate licenses.

Here’s a rough matrix to help get a feel for what you get with each SharePoint product:

Click on image to view larger version

Hope that helps a little. Think it’s time to update the old SharePoint History timeline…