Word, PDF, PPT Cannot be Opened but Excel, OneNote | Resolving an Extremely Strange Behavior of Office Web Apps 2013

This Scenario is a brand new Office Web Apps 2013 (With SP1) Farm Configured with Two Nodes. Load Balanced with Windows NLB and Secured via SSL as HTTPS.

After all the Configuration on OWA Farm and WOPI binding on SharePoint, Excel Files Opens perfectly on browser but Word,Excel,PPT,PDF file types are fails with below Errors which is a strange behaviour.

1. OWA Servers are communicating Very Well across each other and Port 809, 810 can reachthrough Telnet.

2. No Issues on the SSL or Load Balancer because Excel is Perfectly Working (Excel Calculation Service not running in the farm at all).

3. SharePoint WOPI Binding doesnt seems to cause any issues because, again Excel is functioning Perfeclty.

Hanging up for more than 4 miniutes and Error Prompts

PowerPoint and PDF also the same. of cource the PDF Uses Word Viewer to Display Files on Broswer in 2013.

As same as the error on screen, Event Log had few errors too whenever the files were being tried to access but most of them did not give a spot on hint relates to this behaviour.

So Yes, Very Strange but Hold on, We are going to solve this !

After lot of Struggle, The reason was discovered and below are the steps taken.

Demoted Entire OWA Farm and Uninstalled the Product. then Reinstalled OWA in Each Server newly in C: Drive. The Issue was with the Additional Drive (D:) Which I used to locate Program files in OWA Servers which caused the issue.

All file types started working robustly right after the provisioning.

It is a Well-known practice that we normally follow on production environment to Isolate Program files, Logs etc… in to a Dedicated Drive as a best practive but with OWA it doesnt seems to be a good move yet !. Lets wait for a response from Microsoft and till then you better have your whole OWA Located to C Drive which is simple and hassle free.

The Bottom-line Is: WAC must be installed to the same drive letter as the render cache location.

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p align=”justify”>You can Download my TechNet Whitepaper to Setup Office Web Apps 2013 in a Multi-server Environment with NLB and SSL here – https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Setting-up-Multi-Server-23e1f2ca

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