Tips to upgrade SharePoint 2010 with Office Web Apps installed

Office Web Apps is not installed on the same servers that run SharePoint 2013. Instead, you deploy one or more physical or virtual servers that run Office Web Apps Server. Then you configure the SharePoint 2013 farm to use the Office Web Apps Server farm to provide Office Web Apps functionality to users who create or open Office files from SharePoint libraries. For more information, see Office Web Apps Server overview.

As a result, if you have Office Web Apps installed on SharePoint 2010, besides the upgrade design listed in my previous blog, there are some additional steps you need during the SharePoint 2010 farm clean up as described before.

Here are the steps and tips to streamline the SharePoint 2010 upgrade to 2013 with Office Web Apps installed.

1. Deactivate the OWA features instead of uninstalling OWA

OWA uninstall on SharePoint 2010 will dis-join the servers from the farm and need to rejoin that is very painful process. To prevent site collection administrators from turning on the feature again, we recommend that you deactivate the feature, delete the service applications, and then stop the services as described by Microsoft in the following order:

• Deactivate the Office Web Apps feature  
• Enable the OpenInClient feature 
• Delete the Office Web Apps service applications 
• Stop the Office Web Apps services

Please note the deactivate feature powershell scripe listed in Microsaoft only deactives one "OfficeWebApps" site collection feature as listed below.

OfficeWebApps

$webAppsFeatureId = $(Get-SPFeature -limit all | where {$_.displayname -eq "OfficeWebApps"}).ID
$singleSiteCollection = Get-SPSite -Identity <http://site_name>
Disable-SPFeature $webAppsFeatureId -Url $singleSiteCollection.URL

Other detailed steps already described in the above blog and I've added enhanced powershell to remove the OWA service applications as below.

$spapp = Get-SPServiceApplication -Name "<Service application display name>"

Remove-SPServiceApplication $spapp –RemoveData –Confirm:$false

2. Disable the following timer jobs used by OWA from CA or powershell

Office Web Apps Cache Creation for the farm

Office Web Apps Cache Site Collection Expiration instance

Please note there will be one Office Web Apps Cache Site Collection Expiration instance for each webApp. All of them need to be disabled.

3. Delete the Office_Viewing_Service_Cache site collection for each webApp

You will find one Office_Viewing_Service_Cache site collection on each webapp after you install OWA. The site is like this

http://<SharePointURL>/sites/Office_Viewing_Service_Cache

Since 2013 OWA have different  architecture, we would need to remove these site collections on 2010 to streamline the upgrade.

4. Delete the content DB associated with Office_Viewing_Service_Cache site collection ONLY if there is no other site collections inside

If the OWA is the only site collection inside the content DB, we should delete the empty content DB to reduce the upgrade effort.

Please note you need to follow the other SharePoint 2013 upgrade steps from my previous blog.