Teams Users Can Hide the General Channel

Is Hiding the General Channel Important?

I can imagine that many who read message center notification MC711019 (29 January 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 324840) to discover that Microsoft Teams is making it possible to hide the General channel for a team experienced a “so what” moment. The change rolls out to targeted release tenants in early February and reaches standard release in mid-February. By the time you read this, you might be able to indulge in the joy of hiding a general channel.

The General channel is present in all teams. It cannot be removed or renamed. Because it’s omnipresent, the General channel is regarded as the basis of a team. Teams now supports the addition of up to another 999 channels in a mixture of standard, shared, and private channels. I don’t recommend that you create such a monster unless absolutely necessary and justified with good reason, but it is possible.

Limiting General Channel Posts

With so many channels available to segregate conversations, team owners often limit posting to the General channel (Figure 1) and keep interaction there to announcements of general interest. This tactic serves to force members to consider which of the available channels is best suited to their topic and prevents a mishmash of unrelated conversations accruing in the General channel.

If posting is restricted to the General channel, the channel occupies unnecessary space in the teams and channel list. This didn’t matter so much in the past, but the teams and channels list can include many more channels now and if every team in the list has a General channel, it’s obvious that less space is available to display more important channels. This is the logic behind the change.

Hide and Restore the General Channel

Team owners cannot hide the General channel for all members. Instead, individual members (both tenant users and guests) decide if they want to show or hide the channel. To hide the channel, select the […] menu beside the General channel in the list of teams and channels and then choose Hide (Figure 2). Teams then removes the channel from the displayed list.

If the General channel is the only channel in the team, hiding General moves the team into the list of hidden teams and displays an informational message (Figure 3). I guess this is logical. If the General channel is the only channel in a team, hiding it and keeping the team in the visible list of teams doesn’t make sense. It’s better to move the entire team to the hidden list from where users can select and show the team if necessary.

To restore the channel, select See all channels link at the bottom of the channel list, select General, and click Show (Figure 4).

Alternatively, use the Channels tab in the Manage team option to unhide the channel.

The option to hide the General channel is not supported in the classic Teams client. However, if you switch from the new Teams client to the classic client and back, hidden channel settings are respected.

Reasonable and Sensible Change

Allowing users to hide the General channel is a reasonable and sensible change. There’s no doubt that not much activity happens in many General channels and removing these underused containers from the teams and channels list frees up space for more important information. A nice enhancement might be an option to remove the General channel for all teams in the Your teams (exposed) list. Then again, it’s not hard to do a one-time cleanup to hide the General channels for selected teams in that list. I must be getting lazy.

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