Reviewing Central Administration Settings for the PowerPoint Service Application and Word Viewing Service Application

Farm administrators should familiarize themselves with the range of options available for the different Office Web Apps. The Excel Office web app functionality is embedded in the Excel Services web app, so the settings available for the Excel services application are more complex than those for the PowerPoint service application or the Word Viewing service application. The Excel Services configuration is covered in Chapter 26, “Extending SharePoint 2010 with Excel Services, Access Services, and Visio Graphics Services.”

To review the PowerPoint service application, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the central administrator site, and from the home page under the Application Management section, click Manage Service Applications.
2. Click the top-level PowerPoint Service App link (not the link indented under it), and the Manage PowerPoint Service Application page opens, as shown in Figure 27.5.

   Figure 27.5. Manage PowerPoint Service Application page.

   

3. In the Supported File Formats section, note the options for file format support include Open XML Presentations in the .pptx and related formats (.pptm, .potx, and .potm), and PowerPoint 97–2003 Presentations in the .ppt and related formats (.pot).
4. The Broadcast Site section lists a default broadcast site with a URL (http://abcsp1004/sites/broadcast in this example) and a link to the New Site Collection page, where an additional Broadcast Sites can be created. Click the URL to visit the Broadcast Site and verify that it loads. Figure 27.6 shows the home page for the broadcast site, which lists instructions for using the broadcast site that will be covered later in this chapter.

   Figure 27.6. PowerPoint Broadcast Site.

   

5. Click the back arrow for the browser to return to the Manage PowerPoint Service Application page.
6. Finally on this page, the PowerPoint 97–2003 Presentation Scanning section allows the option to disable PowerPoint 97–2003 presentation scanning, a process that checks for malicious content in the document but can slow down performance. A best practice is to leave Presentation Scanning enabled, unless performance issues are encountered, in which case it can be disabled.

   Tip

   You can set maximum worker processes for the PowerPoint Viewing service application by using Windows PowerShell, which can also affect server performance. See the Microsoft document “Configure PowerPoint service application settings” (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee837424.aspx) for the instructions and the PowerShell script.

7. Review the settings to ensure that they meet the organization’s requirements, and click OK if changes were made or Cancel if no changes were made.

To review the Word Viewing service application, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Central Administrator site, and from the home page under the Application Management section, click on Manage Service Applications.
2. Click the top-level Word Viewing Service Application link (not the link indented under it), and the Word Viewing Service Application page opens, as shown in Figure 27.7.

   Figure 27.7. Word Viewing Service Application settings page.

   

3. In the Supported File Formats: Viewing section options are provided to enable support for Open XML (.docx, .dotx, .docm, .dotm) and Word 97–2003 (.doc, .dot) file types.
4. The Embedded Font Support section is set to not Disable embedded fonts, but embedded fonts support can be turned off if needed.
5. The Word 97–2003 Document Scanning is enabled by default but can be turned off if needed.
6. The Recycle Threshold is set to 5 by default and refers to the number of Word documents that a process should be allowed to render before the process is recycled. Changes require an IISreset to take effect.
7. Total Active Processes specified the number of worker processes dedicated to viewing Word documents and is set to 3 by default. Changes require an IISreset to take effect.