How to fix Multiple Documents with same Document ID

Question

I have a SharePoint 2010 Document Center site collection with Document Id's enabled. In the properties for any item there is a link to the document ID that should open the document. Instead the link takes me to a search results page which is NOT the standard search results page for the site (we have an Enterprise Search Center which is used for all other search results). The search results page shows the following message:

Property doesn't exist or is used in a manner inconsistent with schema settings

This search page also has the context dropdown which is disabled on the rest of the site collection. If I select "All Sites" from the dropdown and search again on the same terms it takes me to the correct search results page, and shows me about 35 results. When I view the properties of each of the items returned on that search page (well, I've tested about 6 of them), it shows me they all have the same document ID. Not only do they have the same document ID but it looks like they all live in the same library. This is a scenario that should not be possible, but it happened.

This is all very vexing to me and definitely to my users.

Thanks for any help!

• Matt

** Update 12/7/2012 **

We went with the approach that avoided contacting Microsoft for now. What we tried to do was download all the documents and then delete them from SharePoint. After that I emptied the recycle bin in the site collection, and had the user re-upload all of the documents, but they KEPT their old document IDs!? This might require a new question, and that's fine, but now I'd like to know if anybody knows of a way to remove these embedded IDs from a document automatically (see: powershell or some other script/code)? This might only happen with Office documents (the ones in question are Word docs). At any rate I found the information in the documents and it looked like I was able to remove the document ID from one, but that's going to be slow going for the 35 or so that need to be fixed, since I had to do it within Word.

Answer 1

OK, So I figured out a solution to this problem. I really don't know what caused it (I am thinking someone made a copy or something and for whatever reason when they uploaded the copy SharePoint didn't change the ID) because I wasn't able to reproduce the issue with newer documents.

The solution:

1. Find your doucments with non-unique ID’s either by searching or scrolling through the Library view
2. Open the item in whichever MS Office application (this fix might not work or even matter for non-Office documents)
3. Go to the File tab in the Ribbon (assuming MS Office 2010 or higher), select the "Info" section, then select "Advanced Properties" from the Properties dropdown under the document thumbnail on the right side.
4. In the properties list in the dialog that opens up, select each entry starting with _dlc and DELETE it.
5. Close the dialog
6. CHECK IN the document, and leave a comment for future users about what you did.
7. Verify the document ID is different in the "View Properties" window in SharePoint
8. Update any links based on Document ID that were pointing to this document

Hopefully this helps people out. It is very possible this was a problem that got fixed by a CU or hotfix from MS and that is why I can't reproduce the issue, now. It also doesn't really help that most, if not all, of the documents I was working with are several months old at this point, so the contributors don't really remember what they did when checking them in.

Answer 2

Though this is a very old post, but the duplicate docId issue still exists with SharePoint 2010.

Recently Microsoft added a fix for this in August 2015 CU. Explained here - http://code2care.org/2015/sharepoint-2010-august-2015-update-kb3055049-duplicate-document-id-issue-bug-fixed/

Answer 3

Document ID is a managed search property that is handled by the same search service application as the rest of your farm:

DocID is a managed property so you may want to use the following search syntax: docid:doc id value, for example in search type – docid:J2W3DN6QF6XW-2-96.

From Document ID in SharePoint Server 2010

The default search center is configured per site collection, so I'm assuming the search results page just wasn't configured for your Document Center site collection.

To configure this, go to your Document Center site, click Site Settings > Site Actions > Search Settings (under "Site Collection Administration") > look for "Site Collection Search Results Page" > Set it and save.

Hope that helps.

Edit:

From the same link:

In list views and in view properties of documents the Document ID column can be displayed. The Document ID column is a URL with a format like: http://site/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=J2W3DN6QF6XW-2-40. When this URL is clicked search will be used to find the document. This allows the URL to work even if the document has been moved to another location.

If you are seeing the wrong search center, I'd take this to be a search configuration issue.

However no two unique documents should ever have the same Document ID. The Document ID is generated by the site specific prefix and two numbers. The first number is the ID of the library the document was originally saved in. The second number is the list item ID in the list the document was originally saved in. Since no two lists (in the same site collection) have the same ID and no two items in a list share a list item ID, the fact that multiple documents are using the same Document ID would be concerning.

Can you find a common source of these files that may be causing an issue? Like perhaps a document is being copied via a workflow for use as a "template"?

Edit 2:

Document IDs should always be unique. There was a SharePoint bug fixed in the March 2012 CU. The issue is described as:

Assume that you save a site as a template and use the template to create a new site. Then, you add documents to a document library on the new site. In this situation, the documents on the new site have the same document IDs as the documents on the site that you saved as a template.

Could this be the cause of your duplicated Document IDs?