At this point you now have options
regarding how you want to configure the protocol that enables Office
Web Apps 2013 to talk to SharePoint 2013. The first section outlines
the steps needed to install a nonsecure, or HTTP, farm. After that you
will walk through the steps to create an Office Web Apps farm using
HTTPS communications. As you might expect, the HTTP farm is easier to
configure and is suitable for development, for small or highly isolated
farms. The standard is to use HTTPS communications, which involves an
extra layer of complexity related to the use of SSL certificates. Using
a certificate purchased from an external vendor requires that it is
resolvable on the Internet. Using a certificate that can be validated
internally requires extra services on different servers to act as a
certificate authority. Weigh your requirements against the complexity
and security each of these options brings to the table.
Creating Your Own Certificate for Testing
If after reading the preceding section
you think it might be a great idea to use HTTPS but the only thing
holding you back is lack of an SSL certificate, you are in luck. IIS
supports creating a self-signed certificate, and this section will walk
you through the steps to take advantage of this capability. Keep in
mind that self-signed certificates are not trusted by browsers by
default, and most modern browsers will issue warnings if you try to
access a site that has an untrusted certificate. That means this
section is not suitable for production. However, because you need your
servers to trust this certificate to hook everything up, this section
describes the process. Just keep in mind that it is not a production
solution!
Use the following steps to create your own
certificate. They assume you are running on Windows Server 2012 but are
similar on Windows 2008 R2.
1. Log into the Office Web Apps server as an administrator.
2. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager from the Start menu.
3. From the menu on the left, click on the server name. In this example the server’s name is OWA.
4. On the right this will open <
servername> Home. Look at Figure 1 to verify you’re in the right spot. Under the IIS section, double-click Server Certificates.
5. From the far right side of the window, under Actions, click Create Self-Signed Certificate. ...
6. Under
Specify a friendly name for the certificate:, enter the fully qualified
domain name (FQDN) of your server. In this example, that’s owa.contoso.com.
7. Leave the certificate store at the default of Personal and click OK.
You now have an SSL certificate you can use when configuring your OWA farm to use HTTPS.
