How can I force OneDrive to use a new company name so I have a shorter path name?

Copper Contributor

We have a couple Office 365 setups where the long company name in the OneDrive folder location is problematic.  For example, 'C:\Users\Ryan\OneDrive - Company's Business Name Inc.' uses 54 of the maximum 218 characters supported by Excel 2016.  I've read that I can change the company name to something shorter to get a slight improvement, but I'm having trouble getting the OneDrive client to pick up the change.

 

For now I only need to force one user account to use a shorter name.  I can re-download all the data from that user account if needed.  I changed the company name on my Office 365 account to test it, but I can't get the OneDrive client to use the new name.  No matter what I do, including setting up my OneDrive account on a clean PC, my account always uses the original, long company name.

 

How can I get an existing user account to use the updated company name?  For example, if I changed the company name to 'CBN', I want the OneDrive data path to be 'C:\Users\Ryan\OneDrive - CBN'.

 

Alternatively, is there a better way to get a shorter path name?  I've read through several UserVoice topics (1, 2, 3, 4), but none of the suggestions I've seen work well.  For example, mapping the path as a network drive comes with several issues; a lack of sync icons, the ability to create paths that are too long and crash the sync client, poor (default) save options in Office, etc..

 

 

1 Reply

@Ryan Jaeb 
Same issue here.  Luckily I've been able to change the billing name with no issues, but Teams channels and synced Sharepoint / Onedrive folders created before the change still keep the long name, whereas newly created channels have the shorter name.   I wouldn't mind creating new channels and moving everything across, but Teams has no way to migrate chats, so would lose all history.