Planning to Support Multiple Versions of the Office Rich Client

Even though Office Web Apps enable users to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in their browsers, the features made available are limited and pared down from what the full Office applications provide, as discussed and demonstrated later in the chapter. Therefore, users will still often work in the full clients, assuming the organization uses the Microsoft Office application suite. Initial testing of Office Web Apps reveal the importance of thorough testing for an organization interested in implementing this functionality. These examples are just examples of the issues that can be encountered and should be taken into account in the planning process.

If Word 2003, Excel 2003, or PowerPoint 2003 were used to create documents that were saved to SharePoint 2010 and users want to edit those documents in the browser, they will get an error message. The error message will state, “To Edit This File in Word Web App It First Must Be Converted to the Newest File Format. This Will Also Create a Backup of The Original File. To Edit This File Without Converting It, Open It in Microsoft Word.” If the user proceeds with the editing process, a new version of the document will be saved in the same document library with “- Converted” attached as a suffix to the document title. Although not a “show stopper,” this behavior could lead to confusion, so the SharePoint administration team may require that files be converted to the newer .docx, .xslx, and .pptx formats before being uploaded to SharePoint 2010 document libraries that will be enabled for use with the Office Web Apps feature and browser-based editing.

Another example pertains to organizations that may be standardized on the Office 2007 suite, but users may still save files using the older, backward-compatible file types. In this case, a user created a spreadsheet in Excel 2010 but then saved the document in Excel 97–2003 format because she needed to send it to an external partner who she believe had an older version of Excel. She then uploaded the spreadsheet to a SharePoint 2010 document library enabled for browser editing using Office Web Apps. One of her coworkers accesses the library from his netbook that doesn’t have the full Excel client on it and clicks on the title of the spreadsheet, expecting to edit it in the browser. Instead, the coworker sees an error, “Do You Want to Save This File, or Find a Program Online to Open It.” If the coworker had Excel installed locally, he would be asked to open the document in Excel in Read Only or Edit mode, which again was not what he was expecting.