Document ID in SharePoint 2010

We all have heard a lot about document ID feature in SharePoint 2010 and wonder what this feature actually does.

Well let me tell you this, this is one of the welcome features from SharePoint 2010. If I have to tell you in a single line what this Document ID can help us with is that it can simply solve our problem with the document URL link.

When we turn on the feature Document ID which is at site collection level scoped feature every document uploaded in site collection gets document ID associated with it.

The advantage is even if you move a document from one location to another location throughout site collection, ID of document remains the same. This gives us an advantage over a broken link URLs for the documents.

Let’s say that you have uploaded a document in a document library called Projects Document. And then you have decided to move that document to some other library called Departmental Repository. So the document now does not reside in projects library but in departmental repository. If you have given a URL to many users to access your document and if they have the old link all they will get it page does not found because document actually does not exist now.

SharePoint 2010 has come up with a new URL associated with Document ID. So first think go ahead and activate Document ID feature and then from the site settings go to the Document ID settings.

You can then configure the document ID to start with certain characters and also if you would like to configure it for all existing documents inside the site.

Remember the there is a timer job called Document ID assignment job that does it. So it might take a while to generate Document ID for documents.

And there is one more service Document ID enable/disable job. This created a column called Document ID in library.

Once we have the Document ID then we can use this new URL to send to users.

Right click Document ID and go to properties. Check out the URL and use that URL in the browser URL and enter. You get the document.

{site URL}/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=DCMT2012-3-31

The advantage is even though document has been moved to any other library across site collection, user still would be able to get the document and as a result will not get broken link URL.

Because we had also enabled Document ID enable/disable job, we also have a field in document library called Document ID associated with each document and of course the ID field which is the base for auto generating Document ID

I hope you must have got the idea now that it's a welcome feature and really a useful when the link to document is broken.


Read more about how can you generate custom Document ID in SharePoint 2010.