This article covers how to validate an Office Web Apps Server installation. I am too new to OWAS to know how to fix it if it gets broken. Maybe someday I’ll write an article on how to fix a broken OWAS. Until then, this article will have to suffice.
We are currently installing and configuring our Lync 2013 environment. We followed the instructions on how to install and configure OWAS. The immediate question we had was: How do we test if this is working at all? The instructions show a few event log entries to look for to validate that OWAS is installed correctly. This article shows a few additional ways to get more information to validate your OWAS installation.
Ultimately, the easiest way to test OWAS with Lync is to just upload a PowerPoint file in a meeting and see if people can view it. If so, job done!
But if you want to do some more in-depth testing, below are some commands you can try to see if your OWAS servers are functional.
On your OWAS server, open a PowerShell session and type the following command:
Get-OfficeWebAppsFarm
You should get output similar to the following:
FarmOU :
InternalURL : https://owaspoolint.flinchbot.com/
ExternalURL : https://owaspoolext.flinchbot.com/
AllowHTTP : True
SSLOffloaded : True
CertificateName : OWASFarmCert
EditingEnabled : False
LogLocation : C:ProgramDataMicrosoftOfficeWebAppsDataLogsULS
LogRetentionInDays : 7
LogVerbosity :
Proxy :
CacheLocation : C:ProgramDataMicrosoftOfficeWebAppsWorkingd
MaxMemoryCacheSizeInMB : 75
DocumentInfoCacheSize : 5000
CacheSizeInGB : 15
ClipartEnabled : False
TranslationEnabled : False
MaxTranslationCharacterCount : 125000
TranslationServiceAppId :
TranslationServiceAddress :
RenderingLocalCacheLocation : C:ProgramDataMicrosoftOfficeWebAppsWorkingwaccache
RecycleActiveProcessCount : 5
AllowCEIP : False
ExcelRequestDurationMax : 300
ExcelSessionTimeout : 450
ExcelWorkbookSizeMax : 10
ExcelPrivateBytesMax : -1
ExcelConnectionLifetime : 1800
ExcelExternalDataCacheLifetime : 300
ExcelAllowExternalData : True
ExcelWarnOnDataRefresh : True
OpenFromUrlEnabled : False
OpenFromUncEnabled : True
OpenFromUrlThrottlingEnabled : True
PicturePasteDisabled : True
RemovePersonalInformationFromLogs : False
AllowHttpSecureStoreConnections : False
Machines : {OWAS01,OWAS02}
This lets you know that your OWAS farm is configured. If you want to see if your OWAS servers are healthy, run the following command (yes – with the parentheses):
(Get-OfficeWebAppsFarm).Machines
This should return output such as the following which will let you know if one of your OWAS servers is experiencing issues:
MachineName Roles HealthStatus
———– —– ————
OWAS01 {All} Healthy
OWAS02 {All} Healthy
To see if the OWAS servers are responding to web requests, you can run the following command where the name of the server is the Internal URL displayed via the Get-OfficeWebAppsFarm cmdlet from above:
invoke-webrequest https://owaspoolint.flinchbot.com/m/metparticipant.svc/jsonAnonymous/BroadcastPing
This kicks out data seen in the following screenshot:
You can also run the following test from your web browser by plowing the following URL into the web browser’s address bar:
https://owaspool.flinchbot.com/hosting/discovery
This should return a pile of XML to your web browser.
