Make documents read only

Question

On a SharePoint 2013 on-prem solution we are using team sites for collaboration. When no more work is required on the document, we have a requirement to "lock" the documents so they become read only and don't get indexes by the crawler.

I am not sure how to implement this. Is it possible to lock documents, so they become read only?

Answer 1

I would probably do it with a new document library where the files can be moved to. Permissions would be add only (a custom one to create) and set the library properties to exclude it from search. Then you could create a workflow upon marking the document as "complete" it moves it to the library and then deletes the current file.