How to Make an O365 SharePoint Online site collection read-only and inaccessible

This blog post discusses how to make a site collection in O365 SharePoint online read-only and inaccessible. It also talks about redirection to another place if required.

Introduction 

 

This blog talks about how a site collection in O365 can be made read-only or inaccessible. It also discusses how when the site collection is inaccessible, you can redirect the users to an information page.

 

Problem Statement 

 

We were recently working on a project in which we needed to do a tenant-to-tenant migration. As a part of the migration process, we wanted to make the source site collection ready after the migration and then after 2 weeks' time, make it inaccessible. When the site collection was inaccessible, we also wanted to redirect the user to a page that would have an explanation of why they were unable to access the site.

 

Solution 

 

The ability to make a site read-only or inaccessible is provided by the lockstate property of the Set-SPOSite powershell command.

 

Read Only 

 

In order to make a site read-only, we have to execute the command:

 

Set-SPOSite https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/targetsite -LockState ReadOnly

 

Inaccessible 

 

In order to make a site inaccessible, we have to execute the command:

 

Set-SPOSite https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/targetsite -LockState NoAccess

 

When the site is set to NoAccess, the business users will be shown a standard 403 forbidden page.

 

Redirection 

 

To make this user-friendly, there may be a need to inform the business users as to why they are unable to open the site.

 

This can be achieved by including the parameter  "NoAccessRedirectUrl" along with the URL in the PS command.

 

Set-SPOTenant -NoAccessRedirectUrl 'https://www.contoso.com'

 

Note: As this URL is set at the Tenant level, every SPO site and ODFB site that has been marked as NoAccess will be redirected to the 1 above URL, hence the URL to which the users are redirected should contain information addressing both of them.

 

Unlock 

 

In order to make a site accessible and editable by end-users, we have to execute the command:

 

Set-SPOSite https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/targetsite -LockState Unlock

 

CSOM

 

While we have seen the powershell commands, this can also be executed through CSOM 

using (var clientContext = new ClientContext(tenantUrl))
{
      clientContext.Credentials = spoCredentials;
      var tenant = new Tenant(clientContext);
      var siteProperties = tenant.GetSitePropertiesByUrl(siteUrl, true);
      clientContext.Load(siteProperties);
      clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
      Console.WriteLine("LockState: {0}", siteProperties.LockState);
      siteProperties.LockState = "Unlock";
      siteProperties.Update();
      clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
}

Reference links 

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-sposite?view=sharepoint-ps

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-spotenant?view=sharepoint-ps 

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sumanc/2014/11/19/how-to-change-the-lock-state-via-csom/

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/140636/office-365-read-only-mode