Renaat's posterous

I like SharePoint and I like QR-codes (and  other things in life like fries, Belgian beer and my cat but this hasn’t got anything to do with this post) so I had this idea to mash-up those two things.

SharePoint 2010 has this new feature called ‘Document ID’ and basically it means documents can have a unique number. When you know this number you can find the document in SharePoint  even when you got an incorrect URL or  when it moved to another library.

Now what could we do with that?

Suppose you’re having a meeting and you distribute some documents. A paper version is nice to work with during the meeting but in the end you want a digital copy because you’re so paperless (at least I am, except for the toilet … uhm … nevermind). So the trick would be to add a QR-code on the printed page. Wait, I’m going too fast now … There’s something else. You also can create a ‘Document ID Look Up Scope’, and then if a user enters in a document ID it will directly open up instead of going to the results page.

But but but sometimes I’m rather lazy, I won’t type like 20 characters, it’s too much work *crosses his arms and looks away*.

So the trick is to print a QR-code of the document ID combined in a search string : suppose your document ID is APMWRSNS2CQ5-66-87, your string would look like :

http://intranet/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=APMWRSNS2CQ5-66-87 

Now put this in a QR-code and print it on your document :

Scan it with your PDA or wave it in front of your webcam (oh thàt’s what it’s for) and katsjing, you’ll have the digital copy on your screen.

As I revealed this awesome trick, you guys should send me lots of money now (or just drop a word in comments :-)