This kind of request comes up all the time. In general Sharepoint is
designed to empower endusers, not control  them. The way to control them is
the way you control them for things outside software. Corporate Policies,
Standards, and Training. Focus Sharepoint on how to make users more
productive and then train them on how to properly use the tools. In my
opinion proactive control by the user will always be more effective than
taking any kind of "Big Brother is Watching" approach.

Obviously as an ex-business management  professor you've found one of my
personal soap boxes. This is my opinion, but I think its one that is shared
by Sharepoint's designers at Microsoft.

But can it be done?????????????????

Almost anything can be done with enough custom programming, but it would be
almost impossible without writing your own custom webpart. There is nothing
in the out of the box design that would do it.

I'm kind of thinking out loud, but couldn't you either remove the Content Editor
Web part  from the site collection's web  part gallery, or from the Farm itself?
Not sure if that is a satisfactory way to address the issue or not.

You could of course do that. But I think he wants to allow them to use it,
but require that they only use corporate  approved formatting for the look
and feel.

i think the proper approach regarding the content  editor web  part would be
education. i'm a big fan of custom coding javascript based cewp's that
fulfill what some folks take weeks if not months trying to do in vs.net.

what's the true fear of folks abusing the cewp?

The distinction from us and business is that on our campus agreeing to
submit yourself to accountability of this sort is a pre-requisite for
admission. With contributors being more students than staff, and
rollover being therefore frequent this enforcing through the technology
is the alternative to an enormous workload for one full-time content
approver for all of campus. The only way we feel safe distributing
content management  to the students, while still maintaining a very
specific guideline for our public image, is to require either content
approval or this kind of technological enforcement. Our current
browser-based web editor  does control  the users to specific layouts, and
styles, prohibiting embedded html (anybody know how to restrict  certain
subject matter with a web  part? j/k). We've had this same debate prior
to selecting sharepoint, because of the nature of SharePoint is to
empower. For web authoring though, we just need sharepoint for search
capabilities and re-usable libraries. It just happens to have a rich
text editor that is more capable than would be favorable for our needs.

We're actually considering for public web authoring supplying only page
layouts that contain content  and image placeholders.

The rich  editor toolbar for content placeholders would be what I want to
restrict in that case.

With sharepoint we're buying the Ferrari for our document  management and
collaboration needs. For the web authoring portions of our deployment
all we need is the hood ornament, but not so shiny.

Hey, I just noticed that for the caption content  placeholder there ARE
several options disabled that are available for regular content.

Is this a function that I am not aware of because I don't get in to
development of pages?

For us, we just don't have the resources to retrain students every
semester to adhere to university branding.

I don't know the justification behind why it is such a high priority.