Hello Community, I need to be able to shut down an active MOSS 2007 farm while at the same time preventing users from losing data - I know the first step is to quiesce the farm, are there other steps that should be taken as well? Thanks! Tom Tom Molskow - SharePoint Architect - Microsoft Community Contributor 2011 Award - Linked-In - SharePoint Gypsy

Hello, You could email the users to schedule the downtime. Quiese the farm disallows new connections to the Infopath Forms Services and Microsoft Excel Services. The technet documentation states quiesefarm as: "Temporarily suspends the farm's ability to accept new sessions that are essential to rendering InfoPath forms on a server." http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262797(office.12).aspx Tyler

Hello Tyler, Yes, I was sure Quiese the farm is just the start, and I agree that sending an e-mail is necessary, but is there any graceful way to start to refuse new connections or remove the users ability to edit files? Thanks! TomTom Molskow - SharePoint Architect - Microsoft Community Contributor 2011 Award - Linked-In - SharePoint Gypsy

Hi Tom, You are right first step would be to take your farm in readonly mode. This will allow users from stop updating. But this is what I suggest. 1. Put up a putage page and redirect your DNS to that outage page. You can post some messgae over there. 2. You can then shutdown all sharepoint and IIS related services from services console. This will prevent any connection to SQL database from application. 3. If you want to uninstall sharepoint then don't follow step 2, just go into control pannel and uninstall sharepoint.

Hi Tom, As long as your farm has SP2 applied you can easily make content databases read only from the SQL server management studio. Also if you are using network load balance - you could use the 'drain stop' option to gradually remove WFEs. Hope this helps!BlueSky2010

Hello Blue Sky, What is the drain stop option? Thanks! TomTom Molskow - SharePoint Architect - Microsoft Community Contributor 2011 Award - Linked-In - SharePoint Gypsy

Drainstop - "if you bring a host down intentionally, you can use the drainstop command to service all active connections prior to bringing the computer offline." Once you open the NLB manager > right click your host > Control Host > Drainstop. It then stops serving new connections. BlueSky2010