Common questions about the document ID Feature in SharePoint 2010

In this post and I will try to answer some of the common questions that people have about the Document ID feature in SharePoint 2010.

There  are many goodies that the Document ID feature provides, check out my post on the matter.This post is more around some of the common questions that people seem to have around the functionality that is provided.

Can I specify my own prefix?

Yes. You can specify your own prefix so you don’t have to use the crazy one that gets automatically generated for you.
To do this you simply go into the Document ID Settings under Site Collection Administration and change the ID’s:

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• The ID that you specify here will only be applied to content in that Site Collection
• You can also extend this by adding your own logic and creating your own Document ID provide, check out this post on how to do this.

Can I change existing Document ID’s

Yes you can by specifying a new prefix and waiting for the timer jobs to run. However this is not recommended as the whole point of a Document ID is to have unique identifier so be careful from a business perspective if you are considering doing this.

Can I search for document IDs across site collections?

This is one of the more common questions that people have with Document IDs. A document is moved from one site collection to another. People then try to search for a document by ID but cannot find instead are presented with this:

However after some time they realize that they can locate the the document. So what gives? It’s in the way that the Document ID provider is implemented. In order to conserve resources and method called DoCustomSearchBeforeDefaultSearch() is first launched. This method tries to find the document in existing site collection.

If the document cannot be found by ID then it will query the search index to see if the match can be found. Therefore an incremental crawl has to run before you can search documents via document ID across site collections. Do that and you should be good to go!

If a document is routed to the Records Centre is a new document ID created?

You have created a document in your collaboration area and a Document ID has been assigned. After a user has finished using the document it gets classified as a record and routed to a record center.

The one of two things will happen (remember that the Document ID feature is enabled in the Records Center template by default)

• If the item already had a Document ID then that ID will persist
• If the item does not have a Document ID then it will be assigned an ID with the prefix of the Records Center

If you think about this this makes sense. The good thing is that you can get full traceability if you create an item and then route it across Site Collections or Web Applications. I wonder if the same thing would be true if you route it across farms? Does anyone know?

Can I insert  the Document ID into the body of a document?

Yes you can, and I argue that you should! The more metadata that appears in the body of the document the better it will be for end users.

To do this simply open up your document, locate where you want the Document ID field to be located in the body of the document, select Insert –> Quick Parts –> Document Property –> Document ID Value and it will now appear in the document.

Also don’t worry because the field is read only so a user will not be able to change the Document ID through the Office client.

Please let me know if you have any other questions that you need answered.

Cheers!

Tags: document id

Category: Planning, Requirements and Analysis