Office 2016 Server 2012 R2

[Annette Fazzari]

Usethe articles in the following table to learn about Office Online Server and Office Online with SharePoint Server. Office Online Server is the next version of Office Web Apps Server. It is an on-premises server.

Office Online Server can be downloaded from the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC). Office Online Server is a component of Office; therefore, it will be shown under each of the Office product pages including Office Standard 2016, Office Professional Plus 2016, and Office 2016 for Mac Standard.

SharePoint Server 2013 cannot use the Excel Online external data connectivity and data refresh functionality in Office Online Server. This functionality is available starting with SharePoint Server 2016.

Office Online Server delivers browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. A single Office Online Server farm can support users who access Office files through SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, shared folders, and web sites.

Office Online Server is an Office server product that provides browser-based file viewing and editing services for Office files. Office Online Server works with products and services that support WOPI, the Web app Open Platform Interface protocol. These products, known as hosts, include SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server. An Office Online Server farm can provide Office services to multiple on-premises hosts, and you can scale out the farm from one server to multiple servers as your organization's needs grow. Office Online Server requires dedicated servers that run no other server applications, however, you can install Office Online Server on virtual machines if needed.

With Office Online Server, users can also view Office files that are stored outside SharePoint Server, such as those in shared folders or other web sites. This functionality is provided by a feature known as Online Viewers.

When used with SharePoint Server 2016, Office Online Server provides Word Online, Excel Online, PowerPoint Online, and OneNote Online. Users can view and, in some cases, edit Office documents in SharePoint libraries by using a supported web browser on computers and on many mobile devices, such as Windows Phones, iPhones, iPads, and Windows tablets.

Excel Online includes external data connectivity and data refresh features similar to those found in Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013. (Excel Services has been removed from SharePoint in SharePoint Server 2016 - you use Excel Online instead.)

When Exchange Server is configured to use Office Online Server, users of Outlook Web App can preview Office file attachments by using Word Online, Excel Online, and PowerPoint Online. These previews provide rich, full-fidelity viewing of Office files and any comments within them, without downloading the files before viewing them.

Online Viewers enable users to use a web browser to view Excel, PowerPoint and Word files that are stored on web servers or shared folders in an organization. Users can conveniently view Office files in a web browser without having to open a separate application. In addition, Online Viewers do not require Office to be installed on users' computers. Online Viewers also generate the code that is required to link or embed the URL inside a webpage. You can use Online Viewers within your Intranet, or on the Internet.

Office Online Server provides a page at the address OfficeWebAppsServername/op/generate.aspx that you can use to generate links to publicly available documents that have UNC or URL addresses. When a user selects a generated URL, Online Viewers enable Office Online Server to get the file from its location and then render it by using Office Online. The user can view the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file in a browser with Office features intact. Formatting and layout in Word documents are preserved, data in Excel workbooks can be filtered and sorted, and animations play in PowerPoint presentations. However, be aware that Online Viewers allow users to view but not edit files, and Online Viewers can't open any files that require authentication.

From what I researched, I'm assuming I need a NAS device and a VPN. I was also told that I may need a static public IP address. I've also read that I could use a remote desktop software like TeamViewer or Windows Remote Desktop but I'd rather access the files from a Windows explorer type interface where I can drag, cut and copy files and make new folders etc. Some of my staff aren't that computer savvy so the explorer interface is preferred.

While the previous answers are fine, I am throwing in a cloud storage service as a possibility. Something like DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc might be a better choice, depending on your needs. Since its a cloud service, you need no hardware, no OS, its backed up and redundant. Heck you dont even need a client on the user's PC (then can access via the web). These services have the ability to control and monitor access, set up groups, etc. It can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Just some food for thought.

Static public IP address makes the server reachable from anywhere in the world. "Reachable" here means anyone (including malicious actors) can talk to the server. Whether the server wants to talk to them too is up to the specific protocol to handle. This means that you need to strongly authenticate your users for each of the services you run separately and each of them is a potential attack vector. This is not ideal obviously, and that's where the VPN comes in.

The VPN is supposed to be the only publicly available service on that server and take care of authentication. It will let your users connect as if they were a part of server's local network. Then all other services should be made available in that local network only. This results in users being able to use them only when they are connected to the same network physically (via Ethernet, WiFi) or through the VPN.

Zerotier will essentially emulate a LAN on computers that aren't really in a LAN, but can access the Internet. It takes care of (securely) punching holes through firewalls, NATs etc. and makes things just work. You could connect your users and your server into a single Zerotier network.

I'm not sure how secure Zerotier is compared to VPNs, so do your homework. In theory you could run VPN over Zerotier for additional security, but don't expect performance (or user experience) to be great.

Yes, using WebDAV. The server will appear as an additional drive in the Computer view of the file explorer. Many browser-based interfaces are available too. Just to name one popular choice: Nextcloud.

Don't bother with hardware RAID - or with Windows. If you want to go custom, TrueNAS is an excellent choice. It uses ZFS which is basically a filesystem with built-in RAID support. Combining these two gives it superior data integrity checking abilities that aren't possible with hardware RAIDs or filesystems stacked on top of traditional software RAID.

We don't know much about your scenario, really. Some experts believe that with multi-terabyte drives going less redundant than RAID1 is asking for trouble. The more drives you have, the more likely failures when rebuilding the array.

My advice: if you want to do this properly and not spend months becoming an expert server administrator, buy an off-the-shelf NAS. I'm a fan of the Synology hardware and their OS, but QNAP is also a good choice based on what I've heard. I've tried switching to a custom NAS once and after half a year of tinkering I ended up buying a more powerful Synology unit.

What you'll also need is to make sure that the office's Internet connection has a decent upload speed. Residential and small-business connections often have an asymmetric plan that's not suitable for hosting, with fast download (to the office) but minimal upload (from the office). For example, if your server is behind a 50/5 Mbps connection, all your remote employees will struggle trying to pull their files through that 5 Mbps.

You still have the issue of the CPU being quite old, though. It'll definitely struggle with serving files and handling multiple encrypted VPN connections at the same time. (It'll probably suck power, too.)

A public IP address, static or not, is required for a device whenever you want to reach that device across the Internet. (Though you only need one public address, for reaching the office's VPN server, and everything else at your office can be reached using private addresses through the VPN connection.)

(All of this is not limited to VPNs, of course, but things like Windows Remote Desktop and File Sharing should definitely go through a VPN and not be exposed directly to the Internet if you can avoid it.)

A static public IP address isn't entirely mandatory, as there are ways to automatically update DNS entries with your new dynamic IP address whenever it changes (and you definitely should be using DNS if you can), but having the server's address be static will definitely make things much easier (as well as looking more professional).

Finally, note that many VPN apps exclude the VPN server's own address from the tunnel (to avoid infinite loops where tunnel packets go through the tunnel again and again). Because of this, hosting a VPN server and a file server on the same IP address will need some care (i.e. make sure the file shares are being accessed through the server's internal VPN address, and that they're impossible to accidentally access through the public one).

(On that note: Desktop motherboards often do not support SATA hot-plugging the way server and NAS systems do, meaning a reboot would still be required to swap disks. An emergency reboot is when you typically discover that the server will no longer boot at all.)

but I'd rather access the files from a Windows explorer type interface where I can drag, cut and copy files and make new folders etc. Some of my staff aren't that computer savvy so the explorer interface is preferred.

Your plan is less expensive in regards to hardware but you will quickly lose all your gains in the hours spent to set it up, getting employees to use it, and as soon as a single issue occurs like the motherboard dying then you're 100% S.O.L. until a new server can be created.

3a8082e126