How To Turn Off The Interaction Log In The Service Cloud Console

Today I needed to turn off the Interaction Log in the Service Cloud Console.  It was remarkably hard to figure out how to do so!  As such I thought I'd document it here.

Interaction Logs are enabled on a per-page layout basis.  As such, you'll need to edit each page layout to turn them off.  To do so, edit the page layout of a primary tab object (in my example I'm using Contact).  You'll find a button called Layout Properties at the top.

Click that button and you'll find a place where you can turn off the Interaction Log.

Press OK.  Don't forget to press Save on the page layout!  

Now go back to the Console.  If you already had a contact open (or whatever object you were editing the page layout of), you may find that it still has the Interaction Log on it.  Don't be alarmed -- just close that tab and reopen it.  Any new object of that type will be rendered without the Interaction Log.

Bonus for advanced users:

If you've got lots and lots of page layouts and you don't want to go through all of them turning off the Interaction Log for every one, use the Force.com IDE instead.  Set it to download all the relevant page layouts.  Then do a find-and-replace across all files for:

<showInteractionLogPanel>true</showInteractionLogPanel>

And change it to:

<showInteractionLogPanel>false</showInteractionLogPanel>

Now save them all, and voila, the Interaction Log is off in all your layouts.