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=OPEN(your_workbook.xlsm, SharePoint)
Office Online Server end of support: December 31, 2026

Office Online Server alternative for SharePoint Server SE — the same binding, your macros kept.

Microsoft ends support for Office Online Server on December 31, 2026. SharePoint Server Subscription Edition stays in support, so the farms stay and the editor needs a replacement. SharePoint does not care who answers: it binds to a WOPI server, and SumOffice answers that protocol — the same New-SPWOPIBinding, the same zones, the same proof keys. We measured it on SharePoint Server Subscription Edition 16.0.14326.

Book a 1-day test on your farm

We bind SumOffice to your test farm in one business day, free. No form: write to hello@sumoffice.com with the farm version. Covered: Word (.docx) and Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb).

What was measured

BindingEight bindings from one discovery document: Word DOCX, Excel XLSX / XLSM / XLSB, view and edit, in the internal-https zone. view is the default action, exactly as Office Online Server declares it.
OpeningA macro workbook and a document with five pictures opened from a Documents library with SharePoint's own button, in SumSheet and SumDoc.
Saving backThe edit landed: PutFile 200, WOPI PutFile Success in the ULS log, and new versions in the library attributed to the user who made them.
SignaturesSharePoint verifies the proof key on every request. 13 checks, zero refusals. Two editors behind one discovery must sign with one key — ours do.
What came backThe VBA project byte for byte and all five pictures byte for byte, with the edit in place.
Microsoft Excel and Word afterwardsRe-verification in progress. The claim is withdrawn until it is re-checked. We said here that both open the returned files without a repair dialog. The tool that checked it reported a clean open whenever Excel had any workbook on screen — including its own empty one — and this session contained no deliberately damaged file to prove the tool could tell the difference. The claim may well be true; we cannot show it, so we are not making it. Everything else in this row was measured on 26 September 2026, on SharePoint Server Subscription Edition 16.0.14326.20450, with a real macro workbook (22 parts, a VBA project and a Power Query binding) and a document carrying five pictures — WMF, two EMF, PNG and JPEG. The workbook went 1.0 → 2.0 in the library and the document 3.0 → 4.0; both files were then opened in Microsoft Excel and Word on macOS. A control was run — the copy sitting in the library before the round opened silently too — but it guards against a different fault: it rules out the file, not a tool that answers “clean” without looking at which workbook is open.
What SharePoint does to the fileWorth knowing before you compare checksums: SharePoint does not store the uploaded package byte for byte — our 22-part workbook came back from the library with 40 entries, including its own [trash] streams. That is its storage, not the editor. What the editor writes back is a clean package, and the parts that matter — the VBA project, the pictures, the Power Query binding — are identical.
Not countedPeople, sites, documents. A test farm is free; production is priced per farm — no per-user meter, which is the part that usually decides this comparison.

Office Online Server alternatives, side by side

Every row below links to its source. Where a vendor does not publish a fact, the cell says so. We have run only our own column on a SharePoint farm.

SumOfficeCollabora OnlineONLYOFFICE DocsStay without OOS
On-premises, inside your networkYes: two editor containers with docker compose, behind your https address (step 1 below).Yes: self-hosted. Collabora publishes a SharePoint page that offers it as the Office Online Server replacement.Yes: ONLYOFFICE Docs Enterprise runs on-premises (ONLYOFFICE for SharePoint).Yes: the farm stays. SharePoint Server SE is in support, with no end date listed.
WOPI with SharePoint Server SEMeasured on SE 16.0.14326: New-SPWOPIBinding, eight bindings, proof keys, save back as a new version. Word and Excel.Published SharePoint guide. Not tested by us.SharePoint connector over WOPI; the page does not name SharePoint SE. Not tested by us.No browser editor. Microsoft names Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as the supported desktop clients for files on SE (Microsoft).
VBA macrosKept byte for byte on save (measured on SE). In the SumSheet app they run in its own sandbox when the engine can route them natively: 73 % of 13 870 macros in the public Enron corpus.Off by default: the server setting that enables macro execution ships as false (coolwsd.xml).Not executed: ONLYOFFICE macros are JavaScript, and VBA has to be rewritten or converted (its macros FAQ).In desktop Excel on each computer; nothing in the browser.
Price€2,400 per production farm per year, excl. VAT, unlimited users. Details below.Business: €3 per user per month, up to 99 users. Enterprise (100+): on request (pricing).Official: on request. A reseller lists US$2,940 per server per year for 100 connections (seen 20 October 2026).No new editor licence. Office Online Server itself came free with volume licensing (Microsoft Learn) and is out of support after December 31, 2026.

Price for SharePoint farms

Production farm€2,400 per farm per year, excl. VAT. Unlimited users; no per-document counting. Updates and engineering support included.
Test farmFree. Binding to your test farm takes one business day, also free.
Each additional production farm€1,200 per year, excl. VAT.
Partners30 % of what the client pays, for as long as the client pays.

Book a 1-day test on your farm

Step 1 — start the editors, on https

SharePoint will not bind to a plain-http WOPI server, and the proof keys are not optional. Two editors behind one address, one merged discovery.

mkdir sumoffice-sharepoint && cd sumoffice-sharepoint
git clone https://github.com/SumOfficeApp/sumoffice-docker && cd sumoffice-docker/nextcloud
cp env.example .env    # PUBLIC_URL=https://office.example.com
docker compose up -d
curl -s https://office.example.com/hosting/discovery | head -c 300

Step 2 — bind SharePoint to them

In the SharePoint Management Shell, on a farm server:

Remove-SPWOPIBinding -All:$true -Confirm:$false
New-SPWOPIBinding -ServerName "office.example.com" -Application Word
New-SPWOPIBinding -ServerName "office.example.com" -Application Excel
Get-SPWOPIBinding | Format-Table Application, Extension, Action, IsDefaultAction, WopiZone
iisreset

Pass -Application. Without it the cmdlet walks every application in the discovery document and stops on «already exist», because the zone that serves other hosts declares the macro-enabled types twice, under two application names. With -Application Word and -Application Excel you get exactly the eight bindings above.

Check the zone: your farm's WOPI zone (Get-SPWOPIZone) must match the zone the bindings landed in — internal-https for a farm that talks to the editor over the internal network, external-https for one that goes out and back.

Step 3 — open a workbook

  • In a document library, open any .xlsx, .xlsm or .docx. The editor opens in the SharePoint page; Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={id}&action=edit is the direct form if you want to test it without clicking.
  • Edit and save: the file goes back through WOPI and SharePoint records a new version against the user.
  • Download it and open it in Excel: the VBA project and the formulas are the ones you put there.

Two things that cost us a day

The token arrives in a headerSharePoint passes the access token as Authorization: Bearer, not only in the query string. An editor that reads only the query answers 401 and SharePoint shows you «Sorry, something went wrong» with nothing useful on screen. Fixed in both our editors.
The default actionIf no action in the zone is marked default, all eight bindings come back with IsDefaultAction=False and clicking a file does nothing helpful. Office Online Server marks view as default; so do we.

When something does go wrong, the answer is in the ULS log: raise SharePoint Foundation: WOPI to Verbose and search by the correlation id from the error page.

What end of support means

  • The date is December 31, 2026. Microsoft announced “end of support and retirement for Office Online Server effective December 31, 2026” (Office End of Support blog). The lifecycle page lists the retirement date as 1/1/2027 6:59:59 AM — the end of December 31 in Pacific time.
  • After that it keeps running, out of support: no fixes, no support, and no public Microsoft commitment to further patches. For an editor that renders documents from the whole organization, that is the part security will ask about.
  • Microsoft’s recommended path is the cloud — Microsoft 365. For farms that stay on SharePoint Server SE it names desktop clients only; browser viewing and editing, search and hover previews go with Office Online Server. Showing Excel workbooks in Power BI Report Server through it loses support too.
  • SharePoint Server SE is in support with no end date listed. SharePoint Server 2019 and 2016 left extended support on July 14, 2026 (lifecycle). The farm is not the problem; the editor is.
  • The documents in those farms are the reason people stayed on-premises: workbooks with macros, with Power Query, with twenty years of formulas. An editor that drops the VBA on save does not solve this — it moves the problem to the people who own those files.

Before you move a department, run its workbooks through Check my Excel file: it names every macro, every function and every data source the engine knows or does not know, in seconds, without running anything. The other hosts we measured →

Then

Questions admins ask first

When does Office Online Server end of support happen?
December 31, 2026. Microsoft's Office End of Support blog announces end of support and retirement for Office Online Server effective that day; the Microsoft Learn lifecycle page lists the retirement date as 1/1/2027 6:59:59 AM, the end of December 31 in Pacific time. After it the server keeps running out of support, and Microsoft has made no public commitment to further patches.
Does SharePoint Server Subscription Edition work without Office Online Server?
The farm keeps working: SharePoint Server SE is in support with no end date on its lifecycle page. Without a WOPI editor there is no viewing or editing in the browser; Microsoft names Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as the supported desktop clients for files on SharePoint SE.
What can replace Office Online Server on-premises?
A WOPI server that SharePoint can bind to with New-SPWOPIBinding. Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE Docs publish SharePoint integrations; SumOffice was measured on SharePoint Server SE 16.0.14326. The differences that usually decide it are macros and how the licence is counted.
Which files does SumOffice open from SharePoint?
Word (.docx) and Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb): eight bindings, view and edit, measured on SharePoint Server SE 16.0.14326.
How much does SumOffice for SharePoint cost?
€2,400 per production farm per year, excl. VAT, unlimited users. A test farm is free; each additional production farm is €1,200 per year, excl. VAT.

Sources

Vendor facts and prices as published on the pages above, checked October–November 2026. Product names belong to their owners; see Legal & trademarks.

SumOffice assistant

Answers are assembled from the documentation and may be inaccurate — check the sources.