So I recently had a specific request at work from a user, which, unless I note somewhere I am sure I will forget. Basically, the requester does not want to grant the ability for users to be able to change the default UI ribbon settings within Outlook 2010 or any other Office 2010 program. The easiest way to explain it is, the user wants to disable the “Customize Ribbon” option as pictured below.
While I don’t know of an exact way to accomplish to “grey out” this option I did find a way to wipe the ability out to adjust these settings within Group Policy. The setting is located in the following location within Group Policy Manager. The setting we are looking for is labeled Turn off user customization via UI.
User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Office 2010 -> Global Options -> Customize -> Turn off user customization via UI
NOTE that you need to have the Office 2010 Group Policy templates installed on the machine you are attempting to set the policy from (if you have questions just let me know and I can follow up with instructions on how to do this). Here is what the setting looks like:
And here is what the updated Outlook “Customize Ribbon” option looks like:
