The Magic Ribbon: greyed-out + active buttons

Releasing your solution to another environment brings a lot of challenges, especially when this is the production environment. It is an extra challenge to deploy to architecture where RDS (Remote Desktop Services), the next version of Terminal Server 2003.

During testing we runned into strange behaviour of the ribbon. It suddenly got greyed-out, but even stranger, the buttons still worked.

Magic Ribbon: grey-out but clickable buttons

Looking closely we saw an JavaScript error (yes, bottom left of your IE). The error point out to SEC7115, which should have something to do with CSS not loaded correctly (to show errors hit F12). You may have similar errors.

Error message in debug window

Security settings in IE 

After some basic debugging and searches we also got some messages stating that "This page is accessing information that is not under control...".

Other side effect was that reaching the CRM application on server name worked fine, using the ip-address did show the mystery ribbon.

After some research this should do the trick and get it working again:
1) Add your CRM url to Local internet  (Internet Options > Security)
2)  Edit the settings in this zone -> Custom Level 
3) Change in Miscellaneous section: Access data sources cross domain to Enable




Hope this post save you some frustrations and looking for solutions. The error might sent you to different path..

Happy debugging :)