Time to tell a tale of a rather interesting scenario concerning deploying Office Web Applications to a SharePoint farm.

The installation of the product was intended to go directly after the initial deploy of SharePoint to the servers in the farm. Following the installation of the prerequisites for SharePoint 2010, then installing SharePoint 2010 and running through all the relevant configuration checks, security checks, then getting OAT (operational acceptance testing) signoff, it was time to deploy Office Web Applications.

A point to all – Office Web Applications needs to be installed to all the servers in the farm – don’t be fooled into thinking (hey it’s only going to be accessible from the application server) – wrong. The deployment needs to go on all servers which are joined to the farm – so if you have reporting servers or servers whose purpose is to manage specific service applications then yes, you must install Office Web Applications to those servers too.

So, we followed the instructions for installation from this link:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee815687 where there is a ton of information.

Then time to install the product. When trying to install, immediately a dialog was displayed with this message:

“Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s) Windows Server Features or Role Services required by this product are not enabled”

There was no display of what features or Role services was required. Very strange – surely the prerequisites were deployed when installing SharePoint 2010?

We ran the prerequisites installer again – all relevant products were installed and running. We ran the installer on all the servers in the farm – same message!

So, we quickly built a VM solely to test the installation – maybe there was something wrong with the farm? Built the VM, deployed SharePoint to it from scratch, then tried to install Office Web Applications again – same message!

In a final attempt at getting the installer to fire up, we decided to deploy the following using Server Manager to that VM:

Role Services:

• TCP Port Sharing
• Message Queuing Activation
• TCP Activation
• Named Pipes Activation

Features:

• Desktop Experience
• Ink and Handwriting Services
• Ink Support
• Windows Powershell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)
• XPS Viewer

Had to restart the server a couple of times to complete the install of the components.

Tried the Office Web Applications installer again – success! So seemingly Office Web Applications requires additional services and features. Am still investigating, and notably there has been no discernible impact on server performance on having these extra components deployed.

Additionally, we then patched to the very latest version from downloading Service Pack 1 from this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26639

So, the gotcha is the fact that you need to watch out for the prerequisites – potentially for additional server products do not be confused that the prerequisites required relate somehow to SharePoint 2010 prerequisites!

Hope this helps out