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amy_lochmueller's avatar
amy_lochmueller
Copper Contributor
Jan 31, 2025

General Channel + Combined Chats & Channels

As many of you have found, when the change was made to allow renaming of General Channel, we lost the ability to create a "General" channel from scratch. (I know the work-around of using templates, but we still have users accidentally making Teams from scratch instead of from a template.) Now that we're in the Public Preview of the combined chats + channels, this problem is more apparent. If you favorite a channel named "General", it displays as the name of the Team. This is great! Much better than a hundred pinned "General" channels. The image below is actually a channel named "General" but it's displaying as the name of the Team.

But when you favorite a channel that is not named "General" - even if it is actually the general channel - it shows that name instead of the name of the Team. Meaning users who started using "Communication(s)" as their first channel (because they didn't yet know the work-around) will see several pinned channels with the same name. Not cool. 

 

Long story short, does ANYONE know of a workaround I may be missing? How are you handling this situation? Anyone have insight on if/when Microsoft will fix the bug that does NOT allow a general channel? When we said we wanted to be able to change the General Channel, we didn't mean we didn't want the option to have "General." We have SO MANY training materials that reference General. And our folks are barely hanging on with Teams. Giving them another caveat for how they have to use it is making company-wide adoption VERY DIFFICULT. 

  • Terry Buster's avatar
    Terry Buster
    Copper Contributor

    My understanding is that this isn't a bug. It's an "intended" feature.  As for sorting in the new Teams experience, we also have a number of channels with the same name in different teams.  I've grouped them together and changed the display icon of the team to reflect that team.  Not the best workaround, but sufficient for my needs.

    Honestly, for the vast majority of the work I do in Teams, I'm not looking through the numerous chats and channels (even when grouped) to find what I'm looking for.  I use CTRL+G, which takes you directly to the search bar in Go To mode, and then search for what channel or chat I'm attempting to find.  This is where the Team icon comes in real handy.

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