Magnolia is often used in enterprise environments with a cluster of public instances used to serve contents to the user. However, in case of maintenance for the public instances, activation from the authoring system is still active and may result in data corruption in the public systems.

Transactional activation only partly addresses this topic, as activation of trees may fail "in the middle" of the activation, leaving a partly published tree on both nodes (no rollback).

In case of maintenance work for one public node, it should be possible to deactivate activation altogether before starting maintenance work on the public instace. This activation lock must be respected by any Magnolia module, inclusive website, dms, data and workflow (including times activations).

Current workaround is to shutdown the authoring system so prohibiting work on the website altogether.