I have a requirement to set a site collection in read only mode in SharePoint 2007 remotely (not from the SharePoint servers).
As far as I know there is no web service available to do this. One way I figured out was to set the content database itself read only and it sets all site collections in that database read only. And, I'm not sure if this is supported.
Could someone tell me if this is possible?
No, I'm also not aware of any way to do this! We had the same requirement in our project. But if you have a server login it should be possible to accomplish with a remote powershell session that then calls STSADM -o sitelock command on the server.
On a side note: In our project we also needed to be able to lock-down sub-sites without locking down the entire site collection. This we accomplished by breaking permissions and updating the permission levels. I built a custom WSP package with a SharePoint feature triggering a .NET callout on activation. The hosting provider then agreed to deploy that package to our server farm. We cannot request access to the servers. But our custom solution, we can now put sub-sites into read-only simply by activating the feature.
