Getting error message when attempting to view a powerpoint or word doc via the browser

The following was adapted from support.microsoft.com <- this link has detailed steps.

If you're getting error message when attempting to view a PowerPoint or word doc via the browser, perform the following:

1. Check that PowerPoint Service and Word Viewing Service are both started

2. If either are not listed in manage services on this server, go to manage service applications and create them.

3. After you create them add them to the default proxy list and make sure the FAST search query proxy is the only search proxy listed.

4. Make sure that the account that is running the service app for both of these is a member of the Farm admins on your farm; as this account will need to retrieve content and settings from the configuration database and the content databases.

5. Make sure you are not using "The Farm Account"; but rather, another registered account that is a member of the farm admins.

All of the above assume the Office Web Apps has been downloaded from MSDN, installed on each web front end (WFE) server, and that the SharePoint Products and technologies wizard has been run on each WFE server.

After you've made the above changes, recrawl your content

and use the steps on this page to verify that your FAST farm is working:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381272(v=office.14).aspx

Use this command on your indexer server :

Get-FASTSearchContentCollection -Name "sp"

- it should show a document count other than 0

And, finally, don't fret, sometimes it takes a little while for all the thumbnails to appear, even on servers that have more than the minimum recommended resources

Following are the Hardware and Software prerequisites for Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

Hardware requirements:

	Minimum	Recommended
Operating System	Windows Server 2008 x64 with SP2	Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 with Sp2
RAM	4 GB	16 GB
CPU	4 CPU cores, 2.0GHz CPU	8 CPU cores, 2.0GHz CPU
HDD	50 GB disk	1 TB disk space on RAID across 6 spindles or more

Software prerequisites:

· Web Server (IIS) Role
· Power Shell 2.0
· Distributed Transaction Support
· Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
· Windows Communication Foundation Activation Components
· XPS Viewer
· Microsoft “Geneva” Framework
· Microsoft Primary Interoperability Assemblies 2005
· Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x64)
· Microsoft Filter Pack 2

Check out this blog for a superb overview of the installation and configuration of FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010 - http://sharepointinfoblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/installation-and-configuration-of-fast-search-server-for-sharepoint-2010-beta/