Changing a SharePoint Site URL When Connected to Microsoft Teams

I shot myself in the foot today and I figured I’d share how I bandaged it back up. In actual fact, the healing was automagical.

We had a Microsoft Team with its usual backing SharePoint site, and we wanted to reclaim the URL from that SharePoint site. This isn’t an unusual occurrence when there isn’t much governance around Team or site creation. People create Teams with whatever names – and thus URLs – makes sense to them. Retrofitting some governance can take some renaming.

Changing a SharePoint site’s URL isn’t that hard these days. I changed the URL in the SharePoint Admin Center easily. See Change a site address – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs for the steps.

Since we wanted to reuse the URL, the next step was to delete the redirect site which is left behind for the old URL PnP.Powershell. See my post Cleaning Up Redirect Sites in SharePoint Online for how and why you might want to do this.

After the deletion of the redirect site, we realized the team had been accessing the SharePoint site exclusively in Microsoft Teams, so we went to check that the files were still available in Teams. Uh-oh. No, they weren’t.

In Microsoft Teams, the Files tab in each channel was now broken, which is understandable – in retrospect. When we clicked into a Files tab, we got one of the standard “cute” error messages for a Document Library.

Panic ensued, at least on my end. I don’t like it when I break stuff.

I talked to my very smart colleagues at Sympraxis and we couldn’t come up with a reasonable fix for this. It was a good discussion, though, and showed the breadth of knowledge we have among us. I spent some time in Binglage, too, of course.

After a while, I was looking at the Files tabs again, and I noticed the in the General channel’s Files tab was working fine. Hmm. I tried another channel (this Team has 13 channels), and it was broken. I tried another Files tab – also broken. I went back to the first non-General Files tab, quite by accident, and it was working fine again.

Turns out, Teams was able to heal each Files tab by itself. By navigating to each of the Files tabs, navigating to another tab, and navigating back to the Files tab, Teams “fixed up” its connection to the corresponding folder in the SharePoint site’s Documents library. If I caught it right, on a few of the clicks into a Files tab, I saw the following message screen, showing that Teams was working on it.

I’m extremely relieved that Teams was able to self-heal in this situation. While I was incautious in my actions, Teams was smart enough to fix itself for me. This is a sign of the good stuff Microsoft is doing these days, realizing end users make mistakes, and so do people like me, even with a lot of experience.