SharePoint Site Lock or Batch Site Management
I get emails from old clients with a an occasional panic in the tone. Here is an example from the trenches.
“Scott, remember when I had you in because all of a sudden everyone (including me!) lost their permissions on our SharePoint site? Well, it’s happened again. I’ve been poking around and I can’t remember what it was we tweaked to bring things back to normal. Do you recall?”
Well this is called SiteLock (How to)
What is the purpose of Site Lock, an administrator can use Batch Site Manager to lock one or more site collections. Typically, you would perform a lock operation before you back up your site collections. The lock status setting controls this behavior. Commonly used to prevent adding of content, locking to read only, or locking out “No Access”.
Two ways to achieve this one is thru Central Admin:
On the SharePoint Central Administration Web page in the Batch Site Manager section, click Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections.
Now perform the request.
The other is thru STSAdm Commands to perform these actions:
stsadm.exe -o getsitelock -url <URL name>
Setting Site Lock:
stsadm -o setsitelock -url <URL name> -lock {none | noadditions | readonly | noaccess}
To Unlock:
stsadm -o setsitelock -url (yoururl) –none
to unlock your site collection. Execute it as an administrator