SharePoint Word Automation: there is no word services application proxy configured for this site collection

If you’re trying to configure Word Automation Services (esp. for use in the PDF Nintex tasks) then you may have used my previous post on the topic as a guide. Not seen it? It’s nice.

We recently upgraded a SharePoint environment but despite following the guide and configuring Word Automation Services and so on, workflows (or anything trying to use WAS) were failing with the error “there is no word services application proxy configured for this site collection”. All a bit odd because it all looked to be setup correctly.

What we found was that despite being setup, the Word Automation Proxy was not actually connected to the web application. In other words: the error was saying exactly what was happening on the tin… which is unusual for SharePoint error messages. The fix, therefore, was to connect the proxy to the web application you wanted to use it in. You do this by ‘configuring service application associations’ in Central Admin. This can be found at http://your-server:port/_admin/ApplicationAssociations.aspx.

Click on the web application that you’d like to connect to and a modal pops up. Switch the dropdown from default to Custom, and you can now tick the box for your Word Automation Services proxy.

After that, everything started to work right nice again.