Rename the General Channel in Teams.

On By sean mcavinueIn Uncategorized

Finally!

Microsoft have recently announced the rollout of the ability to rename the General channel in a Team. This might seem like a small thing but it’s one of the most requested features I see from customers. Having the first channel in a Team be named “General” seems fine on the face of it but not being able to rename this channel in the eight years since Teams originally launched was more than a little annoying.

The general channel essentially becomes a dumping ground for files and posts in a Team and I’ve seen multiple ways customers try to combat this. Either by instructing Team owners to hide the General channel or by restricting who can post to it. Even then, “general” is such a generic name that it was hard to ever see a use for it.

Easy Renaming

At least now that the feature has arrived, the ability to rename the general channel is pretty straightforward. It’s done just like any other channel by clicking the elipses and selecting “Rename channel” as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Renaming the General channel is easy

Once the channel is renamed in Teams we see the new name reflected straight away inlcuding the folder in the SharePoint document library (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The channel and SharePoint Online folder are both renamed

Additionally, when creating a new Team, we are now prompted for a channel name by default (Figure 3).

Figure 3: New Teams require the user to input a name for the first channel

One slight issue with renaming the General channel is that you cannot rename the channel back to “General” after changing it. A small detail which I doubt will cause many issues.

Provisioning Through the Graph Unaffected

One worry about removing the General channel as the deafult for new Teams was that provisioning scripts that use the Microsoft Graph API would begin to fail without a channel name provided. At least for now, when creating a Team through the Graph the General channel is automatically created as shown in Figure 4 and 5.

Figure 4: Creating a new Team through the Microsoft Graph is unaffected
Figure 5: The Team gets the General channel when provisioned

Small Change With Large Impact

As I mentioned, renaming or removing the General channel was one of my most frequestly asked questions by customers who were starting with Teams. This feature is a long time coming and I have no doubt many Teams users will be very happy!

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