New Document ID Feature in SharePoint 2010
Tired of broken links when someone moves a document within a site collection? Tired of nasty URL’s for a document buried deep in a doclib?
SharePoint 2010 includes a new Site Collection scoped Feature called the Document ID Service.
To enable this feature you can go the old and tired route of Site Settings -> Site Collection Features (under Site Collection Administration) or you can launch the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and run the following:
PS C:\Users\blairb> Enable-SPFeature -id docid -url <site collection url>
Viewing the properties of a document in the document you will see your document now has a field called Document ID:
Note that for existing documents some action has to be taken on the document to cause a Document ID to be generated (like check-in/check-out.) Any new documents will have a Document ID generated on upload... Or you can go into Site Collection Administrator and force a timer job to stamp all the documents.
If you grab the link off the Document ID field you will have a URL that looks something like this:
http://<sitecollectionurl>/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=MFSHF5F7ZUF5-1-1
As you can see from this URL we have a new ASPX page in the layouts directory called DocIdRedir.aspx that takes a Doc ID as a querystring parameter. You can use this link to provide others with a consistent link to your documents. Even if I take the document and move it to another folder in the doclib or another doclib in the site collection the same Doc ID will still find the document.
UPDATE: A colleague asked me about Document Sets (another bad ass new feature in 2010 that lets you work with a set of files as one entity) and Document ID’s. The Document ID Service Features tags an ID on the Document Set AND on each individual file in the set. Fantastic.
