Our client PCs use OneDrive folders containing the full legal company name, which contributes to long-path problems. We'd like to shorten the company name displayed in the local OneDrive path. Older guidance suggested changing the organization name in the Microsoft 365 admin center, but that option no longer appears to be available and seems to have been replaced by a legal-entity update request. Before starting that process, is it definitely required, or is there a supported alternative for changing the local OneDrive folder name?
3 Answers
For a small number of machines, some administrators have manually changed the local sync path: close OneDrive, rename the local folders, update the relevant configuration files under the user’s OneDrive settings, and correct the paths in the OneDrive account registry settings before restarting the client. This is easy to get wrong and is not ideal at scale. For many users, a tenant rename or another supported policy-based approach is safer, although users may still need to unlink and resynchronize.
The company name may only account for part of the path, so you should also address deeply nested folders and overly long file names. SharePoint and OneDrive can struggle with those structures, and reorganizing content into separate document libraries may be necessary. That said, shortening the company name can still be worthwhile when the legal name is exceptionally long or contains awkward characters.
In some tenants the legal name can be extremely long, so the company portion alone can make a noticeable difference when combined with deep folders and long file names.
Renaming the tenant to a short name worked in one case, but the process took around two weeks and there was a transition period where some systems showed the old name and others showed the new one. Special characters and long names can also cause problems when opening files from Office applications. It may be worth checking whether the current OneDrive policy supports setting a custom sync-folder name before requesting a legal-entity change.
Agreed—we’re planning to tackle the deep folder structures and long names as well. I’m hoping shortening the company portion will give us a useful second improvement.