Team Owners Can Rename the General Channel

Rename General Channel with a “Meaningful Name”

Message Center notification MC814583 (July 16, 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 395931) announces that team owners can soon rename the General channel (or the local language version of General when Teams isn’t run in English). For years, Microsoft resisted this request because the General channel is (in effect) the heart of a team. A team must have at least one channel and General is the default channel created in every team.

In the early days of Teams, it seemed like the General channel had a protected status where only team owners could post messages to the channel. The idea was to reserve the General channel for important announcements and the like and offload discussions to other channels dedicated to different topics. There’s value in this idea but perhaps not as much as people thought. It takes a certain discipline to always use the General channel for announcements.

Now Microsoft says that team owners can rename the General channel and give it a “meaningful name” to reflect the core role the channel has within a team. Renaming the General channel updates the channel’s display name, which can be up to 50 characters long. Some restrictions on characters that can be in the name do exist, but just like any other channel name, you can include emojis if you like (Figure 1). This must surely count as a meaningful name.

The warning shown in Figure 1 that once a team owner renames the General channel to some other name, they can’t reverse the process and use the General name again. “General” is a reserved name that can’t be assigned to any channel except when a team is created. I guess Microsoft could have created some extra code to track renames for General channels to allow channels to become General again, but it’s easier to say that the word General can never be used for a channel name.

Availability of Rename General Channel

The new feature is available in the Teams 2.1 desktop and browser clients. Microsoft plans to roll out the update to targeted release tenants in early August 2024. General Availability for commercial tenants will follow in mid-August 2024. GCC, GCC-High, and DOD tenants should get the update in September 2024.

Programmatic Ability to Rename General Channel

Current versions of the Graph Update Channel API block renames of the General channel (“General channel cannot be patched”), so the Update-MgTeamChannel cmdlet from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK doesn’t work either. When the restrictions are lifted, you should be able to run a command like this to rename the General channel:

Update-MgTeamChannel -ChannelId '19:L2cxcx_ObbZSwEuRcwo1jEjIGZoxhAR-Fchi-PSujiM1@thread.tacv2' -DisplayName 'Everyone is a Winner' -TeamId $TeamId

A Small But Important Change in the Evolution of Channels

As I noted earlier this year, Microsoft is emphasizing better use of channels in an attempt to reduce the number of inactive or underused teams. With a team now capable of supporting a mixture of 1,000 regular, shared, and private channels, there’s certainly lots of potential to explore in maximizing the use of channels. Perhaps being able to rename the General channel will make it less of a special place than it’s been in past and make it into what the General channel is becoming: just another regular channel in a team.

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