Renaming in Office 365

Back at the SharePoint Conference in 2019, one of the major announcements made by Microsoft was the ability to rename URLs, and have auto-redirects fill in the gaps. Who remembers that news?! Within the SharePoint community, it was a big deal — and was a long-time coming.

I was reviewing my session notes for the Microsoft Teams Virtual Summit (was that pre-COVID? I’ve lost all sense of time), and came across a few links that answer questions about renaming Office 365 Groups, Teams, lists and libraries in SharePoint, and more, and so I thought I’d provide some guidance on all of these items in one place:

You can rename the channels and team name from Teams with no issues! Keep in mind that this is only the display name. The backend group and folders won’t change, which can be confusing if an end user goes from Teams to SharePoint and the folders are named differently. Generally speaking, changing the folder names in SharePoint is not recommended.

Am I missing any renaming guides/links? If so, please let me know and I’ll expand the list.

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.