Closing, Opening and Unlocking SharePoint site collections

The way to implement some sort of site collection life cycle in SharePoint Server and the classic SharePoint Online sites is the Site Policy.

With the site policy you can set when to close the site and what time to wait after closure and delete it.

Closing and Opening of site can be done very easily using server or client side code if the site already has policy assigned.

Below is an example server side powershell code for closing and opening site collections. Note that the code should be executed within elevated privilege context.

---

Add-PSSnapin *sh*
 
## Close Site Collection
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity]::RunWithElevatedPrivileges(
 {
  $spSite = Get-SPSite http://portal.azdev.l/sites/TestSite/
            
  [Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.InformationPolicy.ProjectPolicy]::`
   CloseProject($spSite.OpenWeb())
 }
)
 
## Open Site Collection
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity]::RunWithElevatedPrivileges(
 {
  $spSite = Get-SPSite http://portal.azdev.l/sites/TestSite/
            
  [Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.InformationPolicy.ProjectPolicy]::`
   OpenProject($spSite.OpenWeb())
 }
)

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Reopening the site will also update the "Project Expiration date". This is the date when the site will be deleted according to the applied site policy.
You might need to reopen a site if for example you need to do some administrative task over the site collection like disabling feature, removing event receiver or something similar.
However, changing the deletion date might not be acceptable.
When a site is closed a special read-only lock is applied. If you check in the Central Administration you will see below.

If you have to do change in couple of closed sites, you can remove the lock from the Central Administration UI. Doing this for hundreds or thousand of closed sites will not be very practical.
The issue is that doing below command will not unlock the site if it was closed by site policy or using the ProjectPolicy class.

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Set-SPSite -Identity http://portal.contoso.net/sites/TestSite -LockState Unlock

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The key thing to notice on the picture above is the term "Archived". The SPSite object has Archived Boolean property, if it is true the site is "archived" and read-only, if false and there is no other lock type applied, the site will be read-write. You can just change the value of that property with PowerShell, setting the value to false will not alter the project expiration date.

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$spSite = Get-SPSite http://portal.contoso.net/sites/TestSite 
## Unlock the site
$spSite.Archived = $false
 
## DO YOUR THING
 
## Lock back the site
$spSite.Archived = $true

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There is no client side analog that I am aware of. I hope it was helpful!