As SharePoint becomes fully adopted as a document management solution, it is common (and recommended) to refrain from attaching files to email messages. Instead, you store files in a suitable library and email a link instead. Great solution! But wait, what happens if the document is renamed? You then have a broken link.
The Document ID feature in SharePoint Server stamps each document in a site collection with a unique document ID. In addition, SharePoint generates a static URL that also links to the document. This static URL still works even if the document is renamed or moved within the same site collection. Instead of emailing the regular URL to the file, you can email the static URL instead.
NOTE For the static URL to work, the document ID must not change. If you copy a document or use the Send To context menu command, a new document ID is created. To preserve the document ID, you can move the document using the Site Content And Structure tool, as discussed in Chapter 3.
To use this Document ID capability, you must first activate the Document ID Service feature for the site collection. Here’s how:
1. Go to the top-level website in the site collection.
2. Click Site Actions ⇒ Site Settings.
3. In Site Collection Administration, select Site Collection Features.
4. Look for the feature named Document ID Service and click the Activate button.
If there is just one website in this site collection, the Document ID feature should be ready once activated. If there is more than one website, a timer job named Document ID Enable/Disable Job must first run before Document IDs can be generated. A separate timer job named Document ID Assignment Job assigns unique IDs to all existing documents in the site collection. Both of these timer jobs are scheduled to run daily and can also be run manually.
To test whether the Document ID feature is functioning, perform this simple test:
1. Upload a new file into a library.
2. Go to the context menu for the file and select View Properties.
3. Look for a column called Document ID. This column contains the static URL.
By default, the ID will begin with a random prefix like U7DVSDAQ4X7X. If needed, you can adjust the prefix to a more suitable value. Here are the steps:
1. Go to the top-level website in the site collection.
2. Click Site Actions ⇒ Site Settings.
3. In Site Collection Administration, select Document ID Settings.
4. For the field labeled “Begin IDs with the following characters,” enter a suitable prefix. It must be 4 to 12 characters long and contain only letters and numbers.
5. Optionally, select the check box to reset all Document IDs in this site collection.
6. Click OK to save the settings.
NOTE If a file is moved and a user navigates to the file’s static URL, SharePoint issues a search query to find the new location of the file. If an incremental search has not been run since the file was moved, the file will not be found.