Changing a SharePoint group Title

Question

What would be the harm of changing the name of a SharePoint group? I have a task list that has the SharePoint groups set in the 'Assigned To' for list items. I'm wondering would be the impact of changing the group name.

So far from testing, I found no issues.

Answer 1

There's an exhaustive explanation here on how security groups and users work:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms414400(v=office.15).aspx

"In policy roles, the users and groups are identified by both their security identifier (SID) and their login or user name. "

Seems like the security identifier would be used on top of what the group name is, although there might be a mismatch in what the display name shows in Assigned To.

Answer 2

SharePoint should internally manage the change , as associations inside SharePoint are done using the uid and not the name.

Where you may have problems is if you have any third party code that looks up groups based on names, which is the default mechanism of indexing into a collection of groups.

Bottom line, if you don't have any third party code - you should be OK. If you do, then focus your testing on this.

        var url = "http://mysp/";

        using (var sc = new SPSite(url))
        {
            using (var s = sc.OpenWeb())
            {
                // following statement fails with 'Group cannot be found.' if Test is renamed
                var group = s.SiteGroups["Test"];
            }
        }

Answer 3

There won't be any. SharePoint stores the ID of the group, so anywhere it's used will reflect the new name. If you have custom solutions looking for groups by name, then those will error out. Otherwise, out of the box SharePoint is fine with it.