Change your display name in Microsoft Teams meetings – coming soon?

Right now in Microsoft Teams, you can’t change your display name when joining a Teams meeting.

However, that could be about to change, as indicated by a new property that’s appeared in the Microsoft Graph developer API code…

Why would I want to change my display name?

There are several reasons users may want to have more control over their display name when joining a Microsoft Teams meeting:

• Disambiguation when joining an external meeting. Often, if I’m joining a meeting hosted by another company, I like to add my company name in parenthesis to make it clear where I’m from.
• Cleaning up external names. Sometimes when users are added to an external tenant only the email address is used, or the surname and forename are mixed up. Being able to specify a “clean” name adds to the professionalism of a meeting.
• Using a less formal name. For in-person meetings, I’ll usually introduce myself as just “Tom”. Depending on the meeting type, I may want to change my display name to match this experience online.
• For fun. When it’s an internal-only, Friday afternoon team session where the focus is on connection and team-building, it might be fun to mix up the display names a bit. Maybe one week pick a favorite cartoon character, or TV star.
• Because I want to. It’s 2023, and freedom of expression is increasingly important. If I want to represent myself differently from one meeting to the next, I should be allowed to.

There is seemingly some appetite for this feature already – with the Teams Feedback Portal listing many duplications of the same request.

Why can’t I do this already?

In Zoom, there is already a feature to allow users to rename themselves when joining a meeting. From the Zoom docs: “When the Allow participants to rename themselves setting is enabled, you have the option to rename yourself during a meeting. When hosts disable this setting, you will not see the option to rename yourself.”

There isn’t an equivalent feature today in Microsoft Teams. One reason could be a fear (real or perceived) around user impersonation, or other security concerns. This would need to be mitigated in any implementation of this feature (for instance, by indicating the name has been edited and showing the “real” name from Active Directory in brackets, or on mouseover).

What’s changed?

The Microsoft Graph API is how developers can interact with Microsoft Teams via code. The API contains a list of different commands that can be carried out, and maps a number of Teams constructs, such as Users, Meetings, Channels etc.

In order for developers to be able to work with the API, it’s necessary for Microsoft Graph to clearly document each property of these items and what they do. Also, as new features are added to Microsoft Teams, these objects need to be updated.

In the past few days, a new property has been added to the onlineMeeting resource, which defines the properties for a Microsoft Teams meeting:

The new property is called allowParticipantsToChangeName, with a description of “Specifies if participants are allowed to rename themselves in an instance of the meeting.”

What does this tell us?

We don’t know exactly what this means yet, but it’s reasonable to assume that if this property is here, then users joining meetings will soon have the option to set their own display name.

We don’t know the details of how this will be displayed and whether or not it will be obvious that a name has been altered or not.

Crucially, we also don’t know what the default state of this property will be. If it’s set to true, then anyone will always be allowed to change their display name, unless the meeting organizer or an administrator specifies otherwise. However, if it’s set to false, then this functionality would only be present if deliberately turned on by a meeting organizer.

There isn’t yet anything that I could find on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap for this feature, but I’ll keep looking and update here if I find anything.