General folder automatically created

[AI_birder]

Hi

For some reason Teams keeps creating a folder called General for a all teams I'm a member of. This is really annoying as it gets replicated on a sharepoint site where we don't want a folder call General. If the folder is deleted it reappears (is created by me) when I log into teams. How can I stop this from happening?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @AI_birder ,

Afraid there is nothing we can do about that. By default a folder is created in the Standard "Documents" library in the SharePoint site for each channel. 

For formal document management I don't use the "Documents" library I create other document libraries to save it getting clogged up with any document or image that gets attached to a Team chat.

Hope that helps

Andy

[#3]

Andrew is correct, this is not wrong and it works like this by design

[#4]

@jcgonzalezmartinis there a way to untie the Teams & SharePoint connection? I don't want to have the site connected to Teams anymore and I don't want this random General folder in our documents directory.

The last time I tried removing the Teams connection I ended up deleting the entire SharePoint site. Can you provide guidance?

[#5]

@ChemicalEngineer the supported way would be to remove the Team which removes the associated SharePoint site. Then re-create a SharePoint site from SharePoint Home (if enabled by your admin)

Every time you create a Team it creates an Office 365 Group which in turn spins up a SharePoint site collection. This is all by design.

[#6]

@jcgonzalezmartin 

This is accurate information (General is created) but it's so 'wrong' in every way - who ever wants a folder called 'General'? Surely this is wrong on every level! Microsoft policy is mindblowingly incomprehensible on this sort of thing. Do you use 'General' folders?

[#7]

Agreed. @timmyd27  This forced creation of a "General" folder inside the SP folder that is the documents for the Team is not a good idea.  It seems to be a misunderstanding of the many ways you create Teams. 

• Start from Teams, no real SP content already created. 
  • This then makes sense to have a new SP site with a "general" document FOLDER (not library)
• Start from Office 365: This still makes *some* sense, as you create a SP site with a document library with a folder called General. 
• Start from existing SharePoint site in heavy use: WRONG design! 
  • I already have many SP sites, with many SP doc libraries. When I share things in TEAMS to the SP library (say FOO) I want to display the entire FOO document library and ASK where the document is supposed to be store.  If stuff is being dumped into a General folder inside the FOO library, it is very confusing to Teams members who are doing their jobs fast and trying to understand where the files are? Add to this that some Teams are not associated with existing SP document libraries and it makes a jumbled mess. A Teams member is inside a non associated SP site and starts storing documents that they believe are being stored on the actual SP site that the company stores all it's documents in. Why? Because *other* Teams they may be members of ARE associated to the main SP site that they know and use. While this *could* be percieved as a design flaw from the admin, as Teams is often built Ad Hoc and new Teams are added for projects, this is just becomes very confusing. I would give Admins the ability to get rid of General and point FILES to a SP library of their choice. The top level is FINE from my admin POV. I support many smaller NGOs that don't have admins and they have employees come and go frequently. This general folder bucket just is confusing to all involved. 
  • You *can* add a DOCUMENT LIBRARY to the TEAMS navigation bar to get them to the right Library, but that doesn't eliminate the creation of the General folder inside it. 
  •  

[#8]

After creation of the Teams and its SharePoint site, I'd been adding folders and files at the root of the document library (through SharePoint to avoid all the lacking functionalities of Teams): nobody using Teams were able to find it!!! Another pita design (and not the only one...) of Teams!

[#9]

@Gau You can avoid this by creating multiple "libraries"rather than folders inside a library. i.e. a library called HR that is then able to be linked directly to the top level of files in an HR Teams site. It's a mess, I know, cause you can't delete General which is in a totally different location. Need to hammer on MSFT at Ignite about this POS design. Come on MSFT, I know your Dev teams are hearing about this from the corporate 1000 IT people. Fix this please. We need to create a Team from a Library and have the folders inside the library synced to Teams automatically. It can't be that hard. Or am I missing some undocumented feature in SharePoint or Teams Powershell commands (another problematic tool that is not well documented). 

[#10]

How do you create a Document Library that links to the top level of file in a Team?
Does it involve redirecting the 'Files' button? Or is it always going to be within the Documents folder?

[#11]

@John_Cummins 

As I have tried, once you create the new Document library (i.e. HR INTERNAL) you then go into Teams and link it there. I have done this and it did work. The General folder in this example is still linked to a master Document library, but it doesn't need to be. Add a Tab at the Top  for the new Library (REVIEWS) by choosing the SHAREPOINT app. It's shown in the images attached. Your users then open the library they need. This makes more sense actually from a security perspective, though the whole design of this is a mess. There should be a clear pointer in Teams to the top level FOLDER or LIBRARY, either one. But I'm sure there was some functional issue that forced the Teams product group to do it this way.  I'll do a second way of doing this by creating the Team inside the proper Library to begin with and show that to you as well. 

[#12]

I also HATE this design. Let me put attachments where I want. Let me organize my document libraries how I want. AT MINIMUM, create a "Teams Attachments" folder instead of putting a new folder for each channel created in the ROOT of the document library. I hate this so much.

[#13]

I encountered this annoying problem in July 2024. We started using our "default" SharePoint site as our Document library for our small team of <10 users a few years ago. Now it has several TB of data in it and would be somewhat difficult to move. But, if there is a way to do it, we will.

It is troublesome that every time someone makes a new Team, it creates these "General" and other named folders at the root of our SP Documents library.

Is there anywhere (official or otherwise) that documents a step-by-step process of how to set up a separate SP site to house these Teams folders so they don't clutter and pollute our main Sharepoint site?