On my dev environment, I have an unmanaged solution which is quite bulky and thus Ribbon Workbench for CRM 2013 was not able to upload/download it and was timedout.
We created a BackUp solution for Ribbon using Ribbon Workbench and that is also an unmanaged solution "probably" containing only ribbon details, thus it is smaller.
Now we have our unmanaged solution and on top of it smaller ribbon unmanaged solution, which we use to customize ribbon in our solution's entities Form Ribbon.
When we export our solution's managed solution, do we need to export this backup's Managed Solution also, I don't want to take this solution but wanted the Customizations done on this backup solution.
Please let me know if ribbon customizations are available to every solution or do I have to take the ribbon backup solution along-with my solution?
Components are shared between solutions, so as long as you have the components in both solutions you will only need to export one.
I often work in exactly that way, I have a main solution which contains all my components, e.g. contact, account, case entities.
Then I have a solution with just the contact in which I used in Ribbon workbench.
When I deploy to the next environment I only ever deploy the main solution as any change made in the ribbon solution is also applied in the main solution.
When everything is un-managed, solutions don't really 'own' components, for example if I delete my ribbon solution the customisations to the contact remain on the system.