My company’s upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SP2013 and OWA will be one of the last steps. I’m the guy who helps users directly. Communications, guidance, best practices, hand-holding, etc.
The impact of OWA is kind of a paradigm shift for users: by default, Office files will not open in-app, they’ll open in-browser. I can see a lot of people feeling uncomfortable with this (somewhat unexpected) change, especially at first. How have others shared this information with users? Just an FYI? As a win?
I know we can turn this off on the farm, but we lose the great improvements to search UI so we don’t want to do that. At this point, we’re telling our site owners how to change the default setting per library if they prefer in-app opening rather than in-browser, but if they have a lot of doc libraries, they’re stuck making that change on them all, both already existing and any new ones. (We don’t have a systematic oversight of site collections, so can’t impose on site collection owners to make any default changes). Should we just say learn to live with it?
Lastly, are there any best practices on using in-browser editing that I should be pushing? We upgrade to Office 2013 later this year and I know we get co-authoring with OWA, which is nice.
Just looking to make this change as minimally impactful as possible on our users.
