Recommended defaults for Office Web Apps?

Question

I am about to roll out Sharepoint 2010 with Office Web Apps to 3k business users who are already using a SP2007 installation.

When a user clicks on a Word document, I have the option of

1. Open in the client application (MSWord)

or

2. Open in the browser with the Office Web Apps

My question is: Are the in-browser Office Web Apps good enough to use as the default?

If the organization's goal is to have a good user experience for our end users, would you recommend using the client application or the web browser as the default experience for opening office documents?

Answer 1

As a very general rule, and I hope I am not doing it an injustice, the Office Web Apps are great for viewing documents, but the editing experience will fall well short of the full client experience. If your end users are editing documents I would recommend going with the full Office client. If they are just viewing, OWA is probably good enough.

If your users already have the Office client applications installed anyway, I would set it to open in the client application.

Answer 2

I would suggest to read this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431682.aspx

Especially scenarios which require client application. If you find your users into those scenarios, the default option could be opening in client app. In browser could be a nice fall back.

Answer 3

We have deployed Office Web Apps in our organization and Users are loving it. Its just matter of adoption. It gives users flexibility to update simultaneously. By default we open it in browser if user want to open in Client app they can go and change Library settings.