Opening Office documents in browser vs client - options for configuring at different levels? and possibly different users/groups?

Question

We have SharePoint Server 2016 and Office Online Server 2019. Our users have Windows 10 & Office 2019 Professional Plus. What are our options for setting default behaviors when using Office files in SharePoint? Can we set a default for...

the entire sharepoint farm? (all site collections in the farm)?

an entire site collection?

an entire site?

a document library (this i'm pretty sure we can but just confirming)?

a document/file?

I'm asking because we might decide to set an overriding default for all sites and libraries, and i dont want to go to each one individually and change the default behavior.

On a related note, i have a user who would prefer to always default to her Office desktop client no matter what the defaults are on the site collection/site/library. Is that possible? Is there an "default site/library behavior override" setting where you get the behavior that you want, not what the site/library tells you to use?

Answer 1

You can't configure it per-user/group.

You can configure it at the Library level, or at the Site Collection level via a Site Collection feature.

https://www.sharepointdiary.com/2015/11/open-documents-in-client-application-in-sharepoint-2013.html

Answer 2

Agree with trevor.

As a supplement, we could adjust the default open behavior on a per-file-type basis using using the New-SPWOPIBinding and Set-SPWOPIBinding Windows PowerShell cmdlets at farm level.

Simple test for your reference:

To remove the binding altogether so that PDFs open in the default PDF viewer on all devices, use the following:

Get-SPWOPIBinding –Application "WordPDF" | Remove-SPWOPIBinding -Confirm:$false  

If you change your mind and later want to have PDFs open in Word Web App again, follow the same procedure as above, but in Step 2, run these two commands:

Get-SPWOPIBinding –Application "WordPDF" | Remove-SPWOPIBinding -Confirm:$false  
New-SPWOPIBinding –ServerName "Server.corp.Contoso.com" –Application "WordPDF" -AllowHTTP  

Be sure to use your own Office online server name instead of “Server.corp.Contoso.com.”

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