My experience with SharePoint has proved this as we have had a solution for regulatory document management based on SharePoint since 2001.
However, in SharePoint 2007 things are not as easy as we expected. As an example SharePoint build in barcodes - which I have assumed to be unique - can easily be modified by the end-user as sketched below.
First - take a look at the SharePoint document library:
Then we open the file in Word, and access the properties. Note that the barcode value has been synchronized with a Word property - which can be edited manually as sketched below:
When I finish editing my Word document and return to SharePoint document library the barcode has been modified:
The result is fairly disappointing as uniqueness of barcodes cannot be guaranteed by SharePoint.
2 comments:
Did the Microsoft Team ever respond with a workaround, or did you discover a method for ensuring this is unique? Calculated values, or a custom solution?
I am curious to understand how much effort it would be to ensure unique'ness on the barcode. (Especially since it is used in searching).
Hi Richard,
Nope - no reply from Microsoft what so ever. We solved the issue by developing our own event handler ensuring unique document ids (=barcodes). Not easy. Would be great if MSFT could provide such a feature... They sort of set that expectation ...
Morten
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