Recently I had come across a situation in which customer wanted to remove the “Open with (Windows) Explorer” button from the Document Library’s Ribbon Menu.

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Following are the steps to remove this button from Ribbon

  1. Create an empty SharePoint 2010 Solution, you may give your favorite name to it
  2. Add a feature by right clicking on the Features in Solution Explorer
  3. Right click on the Project and add a new item, choose empty element and name it
  4. Open the Elements.xml file from the newly added item
  5. Copy & paste the following XML into the Elements.xml file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
       <CustomAction
         Id="RemoveRibbonButton"
         Location="CommandUI.Ribbon">
              <CommandUIExtension>
                     <CommandUIDefinitions>
                           <CommandUIDefinition
                             Location="Ribbon.Library.Actions.OpenWithExplorer" />
                     </CommandUIDefinitions>
              </CommandUIExtension>
       </CustomAction>
</Elements>

Deploy the Solution and observe that “Open with Explorer” button will be removed from the Ribbon.

Please check out Default Server Ribbon Customization Locations for more location details.