Can one 3rd Party add-in hide tabs added by other 3rd Party add-ins?

Question

I have a C++/COM add-in that produces a Ribbon with a subset of the standard Word controls. I would like this ribbon to contain only the controls I have placed there, i.e. not to contain tabs inserted by other 3rd party add-ins (e.g. Adobe PDFMaker).
I can see how the user can remove these tabs using the Customize Ribbon functionality, but can't find a programmatic way to exclude the tabs from my own ribbon (modifying the XML to include <ribbon startFromScratch="true"> seems to affect only
the built-in tabs). To be clear, I do not want to disable the other add-ins, only to exclude their tabs and menu items from my custom Ribbon. Can this be done?

Answer 1

Hello,
No. The Fluent UI (Ribbon UI) extensibility model doesn't provide anything for that. But you can try to unload other add-ins at runtime setting the
Connect property of other third-party add-ins to false. The Connect property returns True if
the add-in is active; it returns False if the add-in is inactive. An active add-in is registered and connected; an inactive add-in is registered but not currently connected.
Or set an appropriate key in the windows registry to prevent other add-ins from loading, see
Registry Entries for Application-Level Add-Ins for more information.
You can read more about the Ribbon in the following series of articles in MSDN:
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 1 of 3)
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 2 of 3)
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 3 of 3)