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# Renamed Teams to Departments
- URL: https://www.onedirectory.com/blog/renamed-teams-to-departments/
- Published: 2020-04-08T18:08:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-07-23T08:50:59.000Z
- Author: Lawrence Cawood
- Tags: Product Updates

When we started building [OneDirectory](https://www.onedirectory.com/employee-directory?ref=onedirectory.com) back in May 2017, we decided to use the concept of **Locations** and **Teams** to represent a basic [organizational structure](https://www.onedirectory.com/blog/organizational-structure-guide/) in your [employee directory](https://www.onedirectory.com/blog/employee-directory-guide/).

Locations were your company offices, and Teams were your departments.

Back then, Microsoft Teams had only just launched. But with the massive growth of Microsoft Teams in the last two years, many of our clients have become accustomed to Microsoft's definition and concept of a "team":

> A team is a collection of people, content, and tools that work together to produce a business outcome for your company. Teams are built on Office 365 Groups, and changes to Office 365 group membership sync to the team. [source](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-channels-overview?ref=onedirectory.com)

As our workplace platform is built for organizations running on Microsoft Office 365, we decided to remove any confusion between teams in Microsoft Teams and teams in OneDirectory, by renaming the latter to *Departments* by default.

📝 **Note:** We previously renamed Locations to Offices, to give us space to build true location functionality (physical locations, maps, addresses) into OneDirectory.