Fix Configuration of the Document ID feature

With SP2010, Microsoft has tried to provide an excellent and helpful feature for uniquely identifying a document within a site collection called DocumentID.
Well, you might ask the rationale behind this tiny change from MS side..right?

Basically, with the previous version of SharePoint product i.e. MOSS 2007, if the user moved a document within a site collection, lets say from one document library to another or the folder containing the file has been renamed or your site URL has been modified in someway, then you would typically face a situation which in IT is called a Broken Link or simply put a bad url :(.

Hence, in the site collection features, you would typically get an option to activate/deactivate the Document ID Service


Document ID Service

Once you have this activated, you would expect the Document ID column to show up when you try to add a new document to a library, unfortunately there is another catch here. You might see this message, "Configuration of the Document ID feature is scheduled to be completed by an automated process." as highlighted in the image below:

This message is shown because the timer job called Document ID enable/disable job has been activated. Once the job completes at the scheduled time, the message will go away or else you may run the timer job and put it to completion forcibly by clicking "Run Now". However, I can assure you that even after the previous step, there is no certain time when the Document ID would show up if you go for a new document upload.


Document ID enable/disable Job

One v.important note that if your doc lib was already having some documents, you would need to explicitly perform some action for this new column of Document ID to show up..for example Check-in/Check-out of docs.

Do try this out and explore this cool stuff from SharePoint 2010!