Recently I’ve been involved in a project which heavily utilizes Document IDs.  Some of the questions that came up, I was having some issues finding a clear answer for, so this is my attempts to hopefully clear up questions around Document IDs.  This is based on different information I have read as well as some hands on experimenting with various scenarios to either validate or try something I couldn’t find.

  1. The document ID feature is enabled within the Site Collection Features
  2. Document IDs can be assigned to both Documents and Document Sets
  3. Documents within a Document Set, are assigned their own Document IDs, unique from the Document Set ID
  4. Unique document IDs are automatically created within a site collection.  However, you can set the string you want to use for the document ID for each site collection, making in possible to insure unique document IDs across an entire web application.
  5. If a document or document set is copied, a new document ID is created.
  6. If a document or document set is moved to a different document library within a site, site collection or web application the document ID is retained.  However, the URL (given below) will no longer work to access the document or document set in it’s new location until after an incremental (or full) crawl is run.
  7. The URL to access a Document or Document Set by document ID is: http://[site]/[managed path]/[site]/_layouts/DocIDRedir.aspx?ID=[document id]
  8. If a document or document set from a different site collection or web application is moved and has the same document ID as an existing document, both documents can live in the same document library.  However, if you click on the Document ID or navigate to the document id url (from point 7).  A search page will be displayed showing both documents with the given document id.

Those are the main points I’ve discovered at this point in time.  As I continue to work with Document IDs or gather further insights, I’ll update this points.  Additionally, if anyone else has any thoughts or questions, feel free to post them in the comments.