Hi all - any best practice / advise for Discontinued Items on NetSuite, short of just making it inactive?

Probably better to not delete it and just make it inactive for audit trail purposes. You could just uncheck the Show Inactives box in the Item list. Do you have a lot of duplicated items?

No, just some items we need to discontinue, but still have in stock so we want to continue selling these, but not allow purchasing / building. Any other advise?

I browsed SuiteAnswers quick and I saw one that might be a possible workaround. SuiteAnswer ID:68271. Basically in your situation, you cant make the item Inactive if you still want to enter it in a SO transaction but you can make a custom PO form where items selectable exclude that specific item. Might not be the best workaround but hope it works for you