Lock all the sites on a SharePoint 2003 farm to prevent content addition, but permit deletion.

Question

We are in the process of decommissioning our SharePoint 2003 farm. Before migrating the sites to a new farm, we would like to have a transition period where all the sites will be locked in a read-only / no additions mode (similar to SharePoint 2007 "Noadditions – Permits changes that reduce the size of data" mode).

What is the easiest & best way to achieve this? Is it possible to use a powershell script or SharePoint's object model in order to loop through all the sites and lock each one of them (as opposed to manually set that parameter through the central admin)? Or can this parameter be set at a web application or database level?

So far I have mostly worked with SP2007, and my SP2003 knowledge is a bit limited. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I used this tool a few years back: http://spsitemanager.codeplex.com/

One of the many functions it supports is locking a site.

EDIT: just had another idea...drop the site quotas to some ridiculously low number. That would prevent additions but not stop deletions. You'd have to put up with the daily alerts that are generated, but it would do what you need it to do.

Answer 2

While I've not tried this in SharePoint 2003, in SharePoint 2007 and 2010, one of the easiest ways to do this was to merely set the content database to be read only. Users will not see any difference at all, except they will not be able to make any changes or updates to the system.