A client has some of their users in limited permission groups, such as Read Only.  Thus, some of their ribbon commands for this limited group are disabled (“grayed out”).  The client wants for these users to not even see these grayed out ribbon commands both to cut down on the training issues and the complaining.

Tobias Lekman has written an excellent post on his blog about how to hide disabled ribbon commands as well as empty ribbon groups in SharePoint 2010.   To explain this second part, if an entire group of commands is disabled, and therefore not displayed, then you don’t want to display the empty ribbon group section either.  So his solution not only hides disabled commands but also any empty command group sections.

The solution uses some pretty simple CSS and some clever jQuery.  Good stuff.

For the type of person who just wants “the answer to the question” the above will suffice.  However, for the type of person that wants to know the How, Why, What For, and What Else (such as myself) there is a thorough article from Microsoft: Customizing and Extending the SharePoint 2010 Server Ribbon.

This entry was posted on April 4, 2012 at 2:34 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Posted in SharePoint 2010 by Doug Comments Off on Hide Disabled Ribbon Commands in SharePoint 2010