Possible that in the future I will train users on chatter, but currently attempting to reduce the surface area of Salesforce that requires training and management. Appears that if I turn off chatter, global search is also turned off; which makes zero sense to me, and sounds like forcing a feature by bundling it, though possible there's some aspect I'm missing.
Taking a step back, I would like to isolate and disable all chatter functionality and feeds. By disable, I mean that a user is not able to turn it on if they happen to find chatter listed in the tab customization setup, or some other place where they're able to enable chatter on their own. I do not want to delete chatter, so any steps taken must be reversible, and if reversing the steps taken is not as simple as move off-to-on, then please outline how to reverse the steps to disable chatter.
If for some reason this is not possible, please explain why.