I finally got my group to switch from SourceSafe to Subversion. Unfortunately, my manager still wants to use exclusive locks on every single file. So I set the svn:needs-lock
You can discover locks from a local checkout using svn status --show-updates which will put an O before all files which are locked on the server.
svn status --show-updates
O
e.g.
$ svn status --show-updates O 279532 LockedFile ? UncommittedFile M 279532 ModifiedFile
see the svnbook for more details