SharePoint 2010 Document ID Feature

One of the many new features which Microsoft has introduced with SharePoint 2010 is Document ID. As most of you might be aware that in a traditional ECM [Enterprise Content Management] application each content object has its own unique ID, which is used by that object throughout its lifetime in the ECM system, no matter where the file was placed in the system. I would say this was one of the major drawback of SharePoint 2007 for eg. If you had published a document link in a SharePoint blog which was located in a XYZ document library, and later for some reason the document was moved to ABC document library within the Site Collection. You would end up with broken link.

But not anymore with Document ID. Once enabled all your documents within a Site Collection will have a unique ID and can be located using the ID no matter where the file is located in your Site Collection.

To enable the Document ID Feature

1. Go to Site Settings > Site Collection Features and Activate the Document ID Service.

2. Or you can use the following SharePoint 2010 Management Shell cmdlet to Activate the Document ID Service.

Enable-SPFeature -id docid -url <site collection url>

3. To customize the Document ID and apply Document ID to all existing Documents in the Site Collection. Go to Site Settings > Document ID Settings

And provide the String with which the Document ID will begin. I have provided Apollo for this example. Click Ok.

4. Now if you go to your document properties you should see, it has a new property called Document ID followed by a Unique ID for that document

5. The above document now has a unique ID and we can use the following link to locate the document no matter where the document is in the Site Collection

http://SP2010Servername/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=APOLLO-10-2

6. Note the Document ID’s might not show up instantaneously after activating the Document ID Service, the reason behind this is it creates a Timer Job for the same and once the job is executed by SharePoint you should start seeing the Document ID Field with those Unique ID’s, But if you can’t wait you can manually Run the Document ID assignment job under Central Administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions, or if you want to go the old school style you can run the following SharePoint 2010 Management Shell cmdlet to trigger the same.

Start-SPTimerJob -Identity DocIdAssignment

As we can see with Document ID locating and linking your document in SharePoint 2010 is easier than ever.