For years, every new team in Microsoft Teams came with a default, unchangeable "General" channel. How many times have I heard this from clients: “Can I rename the General channel in Teams?” While renaming the General channel through the Teams interface has been available for a few months, developers now have a powerful new option: the ability to set the name of the first channel programmatically during team creation.
What’s new?
A new property, firstChannelName, allows you to customize the name of the first channel in a team. This feature is a significant improvement in the API as it adds to the properties and settings that developers can specify when creating a team programmatically. Want to call your first channel "Project Kickoff" or "Team Discussions"? Now you can do it right at the setup phase. If no name is specified, the channel defaults to "General" as before.
But there’s a catch
The new property isn’t supported in all scenarios. As far as I’ve experienced it, it only works when creating a team from scratch. For example, teams created from existing groups won’t support custom names for the first channel. Also, the firstChannelName property isn't returned in APIs that retrieve or list teams.
Conclusion
Microsoft makes a small but impactful improvement for the Microsoft Graph Teams API. I think that this update is particularly valuable for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and developers leveraging Microsoft Graph API to create custom Teams workflows, and I am sure they will appreciate the extra configuration option 😉
Are you ready to rename a first channel programmatically? Take a look at the Create team API and give this new property a go.
Thanks for reading,
Jarbas
