All Microsoft Teams teams have the General-channel. That’s what it has been since Teams emerged. But it is not the case anymore. Recently we entered the new era, where we don’t have to have a channel named General anymore. This change is impacting everyone who is creating new Teams teams, so you want to share the word and keep your peers up to date. On top, if you have thought you want to change the name of General channel to something else – that is possible too. Take a look at this step-by-step post.
During year, it hasn’t been once or twice when I have been asked how to change General-channel name to something else. Yes, there are lots of situations where it doesn’t make sense to have a generic name – perhaps we just want to name it to be more descriptive. The change is simple to do, but there is a caveat: once you change General-channel’s name to something else you can not rename it back to General!
Navigate to the team and right-click on General-channel or click on … more option -menu.
Then choose Rename channel from the menu
You will get a warning, that you can not change it back to General anymore.
Just overwrite the channel name and press save.
After a short wait you can see the name of channel has been changed, and there isn’t General channel anymore. All your channel posts, files, tabs and settings are as before. This rename doesn’t do anything else but changes the name of the channel and name of the folder connected to the channel.
The channel is still team’s first channel. It may not be deleted nor archived. It is treated the same General-channel.
Looking at SharePoint team site, you can see that the General-channel’s name change also changed its folder in team’s Document Library.
There are no known limits how many times General-channel can be renamed. The only limit is that it may not be changed back to General anymore.
You notice a change also in when you are creating a new team. As a side-step: did you notice that both team and channel creation can be found on the top-right corner of the pane where teams are listed?
The change in team creation is, that now you must give the first channel a name.
This can catch some people off guard, as you need to think what the first channel’s name will be.
Instead of General-channel, it is called the first channel. Now, if you think you just give it a name General.. Think again. You won’t be able to name it General.
Name General seems to be reserved in all languages. For example when I switched my Teams to Finnish, I can’t create channel named General. It just tells that the name is reserved and to try another name.
What I could do, is to create a channel named Yleinen. That was General channel’s name in Finnish and I can go on and keep using that name for new teams if I so want to do. Let’s create a new team and name it’s first channel to Blog ideas and schedules to tell more about what that first channel will be used for. Note that you can’t make the first channel shared nor private. In the core it is still the same General-channel, but now you can specify a new name to it.
And after a bit of wait and adding other members, you can see your new team.
And I can go on normally from this point forward. Including changing it’s name to something else.
There is a one more thing to know: The channel’s folder created to SharePoint team site, is still General!
This may be a bug, so I would not be surprised if this would change to first channel’s name in the future. Currently it can cause a bit of confusion when trying to locate the folder in the DocLib.
To fix the folder name, just rename the first channel to something else and them back to the original channel name. Then the first channel’s folder is named correctly.
This is a great update, as not all teams need the general channel. It was possible to hide General-channel before this, but this change is nice step in making teams more flexible and meet more needs organizations and people have. It has good benefits, like when you pin the channel, you see team and channel name work together better. Instead of having General stated in larger letters, the channels purpose is more clear.
In this snip, Blog posts in Marketing is a the first channel in the team, aka old General channel. Another good way to make it easier to tell teams apart from each other is to use a team picture – it was not done to this example.
When you are using @mention in the channel, you can use channel’s name as expected.
Notifications show the channel name and thus give you a better context for the message.
When @mentioning the old fashioned General-channel, we need to check team’s name before knowing the context.
The change is not huge, but it does impact both teams and users. People creating new teams need to think about the first channel’s name. But as needs change – or perhaps the first name was just a placeholder – rename can save the day.
How do you feel about this change? Thumbs up or down?
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I work, blog and speak about Future Work : AI, Microsoft 365, Copilot, Microsoft Mesh, Metaverse, and other services & platforms in the cloud connecting digital and physical and people together.
I have about 30 years of experience in IT business on multiple industries, domains, and roles.
View all posts by Vesa Nopanen
