Making "archive" documents read-only

There are several ways to do this, depending on multiple factors such as are the documents in a workflow and how often are these archived documents accessed.

If the documents are in a workflow, you could add an additional "Archive" state where the docs are moved when they are ready for archiving. In the workflow state actions you can set the permissions to read only and ignore the automatic permissions.

If they are not in a workflow, you could add a value list property such as "Document status" where one of the selections is "Archived". This value list item can set the permissions automatically to restrict the access to read only.

If these archived documents are not needed that often anymore you could create a separate archive vault and replicate the archived content there. The replication could run based on some property on the documents, for instance there could be a checkbox "Ready for archiving" on the metadata card or use the "Archive" workflow state for that. During the import to the archive vault you can set the document permissions for read only access.

I hope one of those approaches would work for you.

thank you for this. They will be in mix of different workflow states so suspect the first won't work. However the second option could work.

They are all linked to certain (a fairly small number of) specific Teams - is there a way to add a property to the team, to override automatic permissions for documents which relate to those teams to make them all read only by team members?

There might be a way but it depends on how the permissions are currently configured. I recommend raising this with your M-Files representative as it would be useful to see the vault live and then decide how to proceed.