Office Applications Using WOPI

Introduction

Infinite Scale uses the WOPI protocol to integrate office applications. This document describes the general flow and basic settings used. For more details on possible configuration values see the Office Integration document at the configuration examples. More information about the WOPI protocol can be found on Wikipedia or Microsoft.

For the time being, the supported office applications are:

  • Collabora

  • OnlyOffice

  • Microsoft Office

General Information

Infinite Scale can be configured to use office applications as web applications via a browser in an iframe using the WOPI protocol. Among other things and depending on the use case, administrators can:

  • provide multiple applications from different vendors in parallel,

  • define which icons are used for which applications,

  • define which app is preferred to open a file.

Configured applications can be selected by users when opening a document via the web UI. The list of available applications to open a file shows an icon and the app name for each entry.

Office applications are:

Special note on Microsoft Office

Microsoft distinguishes between two approaches running an office web application farm where you either need:

Procedure using Microsoft 365

Apart from licensing, when using Microsoft 365, the following procedure applies, contact ownCloud Support for more details:

  • Customers provide ownCloud with:

    • a written statement about their Microsoft 365 entitlement.

    • the URL of their ownCloud instance. Only users coming from this URL will be able to use Microsoft 365.

  • ownCloud provides customers with a required proxy URL to be used in the settings, see below.

    • Among other things, the proxy checks if users originate from the given ownCloud Instance URL.

  • When users open an office document via the ownCloud instance and Office 365 for the web is loaded, Microsoft checks if these users are already signed in via a Microsoft 365 business account. If users are not yet signed in, they will be prompted to sign in.

WOPI Overview

The image below shows the WOPI integration in an overview to get a better understanding of which general components are involved and which basic settings need to be set. It also shows where parts of an URL are defined, how an URL is assembled, and which component is using which part of the URL. Note that only a few configuration options are shown in the image to get the relationships right.

WOPI Overview Diagram

WOPI Configuration Examples

  • See below for an example WOPI configuration using Docker Compose, to get a first impression of how a WOPI configuration can be achieved. Both, ocis environment variables and ocis service configuration yaml files are used. See the Office Integration document for an in depth explanation.

    • master

    Docker Compose WOPI deployment examples directory

    Using git version name: master

    Note that github will not let you download a single directory easily. You can get the examples using the following methods requiring minimum space. For stable releases, check or update the version accordingly like when there is a new patch release available:

    • Using a shallow git clone which minimizes the required clone space like:

      git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/owncloud/ocis.git -b master

    • Using an external page providing you the folder to download as zip file like:

      https://download-directory.github.io?url=https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/tree/master/deployments/examples/ocis_wopi