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 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.

Below are the prerequisites:

System Requirements:
This office online server needs to be installed on a seperate Windows server 2012 R2.
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 for Office Online Server.

Software requirements:

Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2
Below 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 Windows identity foundation feature to be installed.

Certificate Requirements:

It basically requires 2 URL’s similar we required for Office web apps server in the earlier version.

It requires 2 certificates one internal to trust the connections coming from the internal URL and the 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  trusted third party CA and then installed on the reverse proxy server.

Network configuration:

We need to create 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 records 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 , 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 URL’s

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

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.

These app pools function in the backgroud to provide rich user interface to preview and modify the attachment online through OWA, Sharepoint intranet/internet sites and sharing presentation 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.

So 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.

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 is 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.

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

Thanks & Regards

Sathish Veerapandian 

MVP – Office Servers & Services