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Better to Adopt a Teams Naming Convention from the Start
I was asked my opinion about the Microsoft article titled “The importance of a Teams naming convention” and whether I thought the points contained in the text are accurate. Nearly seven years into the Teams journey, I think that we’ve learned a lot that’s captured by the article, including that if you don’t pay attention to naming, users will have problems with findability and redundancy.
In this context, findability means that good names help people find the right team. Bad naming leads to irritation and frustration when people can’t find teams. Redundancy then ensues when people create a new team because they can’t find the one or more teams that already cover the topics they wish to discuss. The upshot is teams sprawl.
Problems that a Teams Naming Convention Might Not Solve
Microsoft doesn’t help by not providing tenants with a directory of teams for users to consult. I never understood why this situation pertains because it’s not difficult to create a team directory. The hard part is prompting users to consult the directory to find teams that they might like to join. Inattention to naming can wreak havoc on a directory if teams with names like “Tony’s Great Project” hide discussions about important topics.
A lack of discoverability for private teams doesn’t help either. People can use the join a team option to browse a gallery of teams that they might like to join. The gallery is the closest to a team directory in the product but it only shows public teams. Message center notification MC683664 (23 October 2023) promised a new approach to managing the discoverability of private team, but we’ve seen nothing since. Being able to allow users to find private teams (while hiding selected private teams) would be a good thing. People would still have to request to join a private team and owners could decline their request, but at least the team would be visible.
Suggestions for a Teams Naming Convention
But getting back to the subject of what factors should be considered when drawing up Teams naming convention for an organization, here’s what I think:
- Use shorter rather than longer names. Microsoft 365 groups support display names of up to 256 characters, but the Teams client UI can’t show more than 30-35 characters. Aim for 30 characters and use a few extra if necessary. As related in this article, very long names can cause problems for the Microsoft Graph.
- Use a suitable team photo to emphasize what the team covers. The Teams GUI uses thumbnail picture versions of the team photo when listing sets of teams, so make sure that the thumbnail contains visible detail so that its purpose is clear in team lists.
- Don’t use the groups naming policy to apply a prefix or suffix to team names. Suffixes will probably never be seen because of the limitations of the Teams client GUI. Prefixes are a useful way to gather similar groups together in Exchange address lists. However, most teams are hidden from Exchange and a prefix takes up too much space.
- Don’t include dates in team names unless absolutely imperative. It ages the team. Who wants to discuss something in a team called “Corporate Strategy 2020”? If you want to host date-limited discussions, use a channel and include the date in the channel name. Teams support up to 1,000 channels, so there’s lots of space for discussions. According to MC696576 (updated 11 December 2023), Teams will soon include a method to archive a channel, so you’ll be able to make the channel read-only when the date-limited discussion is over.
- Don’t include hyphens or dashes in a team name. SharePoint will then include the same characters in the site URL and it’s good to avoid unnecessary characters as SharePoint Online has a 400-character limit for file paths (the complete path to a file including the site name, document library, folder, and file).
- Use sensitivity labels to indicate the level of sensitivity of information within a team. There’s no need to include something like “Confidential” or “Internal Only” in a team name. The purpose of a team might change over time and make the name irrelevant.
Changing a Team’s Display Name
The display name is what users see in the Teams clients. Team owners can change the display name of a team through the manage team option (Figure 1). Administrators can change the display name through admin portals or with PowerShell using a variety of cmdlets including Set-UnifiedGroup, Update-MgGroup, and Set-Team.
Other Things to Consider After Renaming a Team
Changing a team name to make its usage more obvious is certainly possible, but this doesn’t update the group’s email address, site name, or site address (URL). You don’t have to take steps to update these elements to bring them into line with the new team name, unless you want to. The caveat is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to rename a site address if a site comes within the scope of a retention policy. When this happens the SharePoint admin center blocks attempts to change the address (Figure 2).
Compliance policies blocking a site address rename is not new behavior. It has existed since the introduction of the SharePoint site rename feature in 2019. However, it’s something to consider if you want to align the SharePoint site address with a new team name. It’s often difficult to persuade the security team to exclude a site from compliance policies just to allow a change to its address.
Keep It Simple Stupid
Overall, it’s best to get team naming right from the start. The essence of a good teams naming convention are simplicity and clarity. Going back and renaming teams is possible, but it creates its own challenges. Make users happy with simple team names and appropriate photos. It’s the right thing to do!
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