I spent quite some time today on a question I was asked. In an existing solution, we added a custom action (button) to the standard menu (the dropdown menu on your account name in the right upper corner of a site). This button was a “Add site to favorites” custom solution. The request was: can we move that button to the same place the default “I Like it” and “Tags & Notes” buttons are? I didn’t think that this would be such a problem. But I was wrong due to my good friend: the Sandbox. <\/p>\n
There’s two important things to know. First of all, the default “I Like it” and “Tags & Notes” buttons are not<\/strong> in the ribbon, although they appear to be. That’s because the area shown by default, the “Browse” tab, is not an actual ribbon tab. I don’t exactly know why this choice was made, probably because you might want to disable the ribbon without losing this area. The area is defined in you master page instead.<\/p>\n Ok so where do those buttons then come from? We’ll they’re in a feature called ‘SocialRibbonControl’<\/strong>. Inspecting the element files learns us that the buttons are defined twice: in SocialDelegateControl.xml and SocialRibbonControl.xml. The ribbon buttons are shown in a document library, they’re not of interest at this point. The delegate controls tell us that we’re dealing with delegates here.<\/p>\n The delegate control being used is GlobalSiteLink3<\/strong>. So we now know what to do, right? Create a new feature, implement a custom control and use a Control node to overwrite the delegate with our control. Easy peasy. Sure. When you’ve got farm access.<\/p>\n For some reason, Microsoft decided to mark the DelegateControl definition for GlobalSiteLink3 with Scope=”Farm”<\/em>. So the only features allowed to overwrite it are farm scoped features<\/strong>. And there’s the second important thing to know: farm scoped features are not allowed in a sandboxed environment. Why scope the delegate\u00a0Microsoft, WHY!? I really don’t understand why you would limit us like that. What’s the security risk here? By the way, this scope is only applied to GlobalSitelink2 and GlobalSiteLink3.<\/p>\n I checked, hoping that they might have changed this in Office 365, but unfortunately they did not. I’ll open up a ticket about that, but untill it’s fixed this means you’ve got two options:<\/p>\n But both aren’t good options for me at this time. Perhaps Microsoft will come up with a solution. Changing the v4\u00a0masterpage definition for Office 365 would be the easiest, but the chance of that happening soon is… well… not that big.<\/p>\n\n