SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Links Missing, Ribbon Buttons Disabled – Fix

After setting up a new SharePoint 2010 farm, I noticed most of the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon buttons including “New” “Extend” buttons are disabled!

Also few links in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration were missing: E.g.

• “Manage Services on the Server” link missing under Servers
• “Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings” under E-mail and Text Messages (SMS).
• “Perform a Backup” “Restore from a backup” Configure Backup Settings” links are missing in “Farm Backup and Restore”

  

Root cause:

This issue happens when a SharePoint Farm Administrator doesn’t have local administrator rights on the SharePoint Server! It also happens when UAC or IE Enhanced Security Configuration (ESC) is enabled!

Fix:

Add the user to the “Administrators” user group of all SharePoint Servers. Get Central Administration Ribbon Buttons and Links Disabled! Disable UAC from Control Panel, Disable IE ESC from Server Manager of Windows Server 2008.

In an another case, Fix was: Synced all SharePoint Servers Timezone with AD Domain controller by running “w32tm /resync”