Failed to open a document with a Office Web App in SharePoint 2010

Today I got this error while opening a Word document stored in a SharePoint library. This document should be opened in the Word Web App. – IT WAS A DOCUMENT IN A MIGRATED CONTENT DATABASE…

WordWebApp-Error-01

(“Word Web App cannot open this document for viewing because of an unexpected error. To view this document, open it in Microsoft Word.”)

I looked into SharePoint log and found this error message:

WordWebApp-Error-02

(“Requesting item that was not generated”)

Then I looked into Windows Event Viewer and found this critical error event:

(“SQL Database ‘…’ on SQL Server instance ‘…’ not found. Aditional error information from SQL Server is included below.” … Followed by some messages in german (because the SQL Servers language is german)… “Fehler bei der Anmeldung” which means: “Access Denied”

WordWebApp-Error-03

Solution:

The Service Account of the SharePoint Web Services System needs “db_owner” rights on the migrated content databases!!! (You see this account in the event log message!!!)

One thought on “Failed to open a document with a Office Web App in SharePoint 2010

  1. You’re my hero! Web Apps blew up a few weeks ago when installing. The SP Configuration Wizard would stop at step 2. I found in the logs a solution was causing the issue. With that resolved last night during our server patching time I was able to get the Web Apps fully installed and the config. wiz. completed. Then I ran into both the issues you describe above. Following your solution worked! Thank you for posting this information. Todd

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