Any way to disable the side-command menu in Desktop

Apparently you can disable the task area: M-Files Customer Support Portal (site.com)

That said I'm interested - although I probably don't have any practical solutions for you - in the MDCC rule that is bypassed by using something in the task area.

I should also highlight that MDCC rules are executed client-side and are not infallible.  For example: some of our clients support only a subset of these rules.  Integrations via our APIs, also, will bypass such configuration rules.  If you are creating rules that mandate business processes then you should consider whether enforcing these rules via server-side code (e.g. in a VAF/VBScript event handler) is something that is worth investing in.

Adding to Craig's comments, there are add-ons which add custom commands to the task area so depending on your vault configuration and what applications you have installed users may need the task area to perform certain operations. In the long term I believe the plan is to get rid of the task area once these custom commands have found a new place in the UI.

And for the MDCC rules, Configuring the M-Files Metadata Card has this statement echoing what Craig said:

Thank you for this Craig - is there a way to disable the task area centrally and universally from M-Files Admin??

I'll give some background on this issue, in case it is linked other issues or maybe helpful to M-F for future improvements.

So, all of our Requests (Leave, Duty Travel etc.), I have set up so that the value in the "Requestor" field is dynamically set according to the current user. This field is read-only. In this example, I am creating a Leave Request using my Administrator account.

Now, a colleague showed me that, if a user goes to the staff list and clicks to activate another users profile (in the pictured example, I select myself), and then clicks to create a document while the on the other user - then the Request will be initiated with the "Requestor" field set as the highlighted user and not the current user!

Just as I was writing this e-mail, I discovered that this can even be done if I right-click on another users profile and click "Create" so I guess that even disabling the task area will not fix it but at least will limit it.

I would raise this concern with your reseller.  It sounds like the MDCC rule is taking that "person" context, not necessarily from the current user.  If the rule is correctly configured (I don't do much MDCC rules, so I don't know what's possible and what's not) then maybe there's a bug that needs looking at.

Someone else on this forum who uses MDCC rules in anger may be able to comment further, although they may need an idea of the current rule JSON that's being used.

I am only aware of setting this value in the way that the support document states, not centrally.  As Joonas mentions below: our longer-term aim for the UI is to try to deprecate the task area (you can see, for example, the web interface doesn't have it), once we can relocate various existing custom commands and other UI elements.  There's no published timeframe for this to happen, but it will factor into how much additional development will be done to enable centralised management of this feature, for example.

Thank you the information and for your help Craig!