In working with the document id service in one of my labs I found some interesting "features" of this new SharePoint 2010 feature.
- When you activate the Site Collection Feature, you MUST wait for the timer job to complete BEFORE you change the site prefix. If you move to fast for SharePoint and you change the site prefix, you will HOSE the site collection timer job setup. I have found no way to fix this. You will never see the Document ID column show up in the libraries.
- After the timer job runs, if you want to change the prefix, you must update each item before the ID resets. For some reason, it is not changed via the timer job
- The format of the out of box ID Provider is SITEPREFIX-LISTID-ITEMID where LISTID is the autoincrement integer value for each list that is created on a web and the ITEMID is the autoincrement integer value for the item in the list
- ID's are ONLY generated for "Document" content types...this is LAME. I want all documents that inherit from "Document" to get an ID. SP Team, this is easy...check for the Content ID lineage prefix of 0x0101 and simply assign the ID!
- You can create your own Document ID Provider if you don't like this particular ID generation (part of my SharePoint Server Dev course)
Document ID Service has a ways to go, but it will get there!
Chris