#PowerFix🛠️ 2 - Chatbot in Teams shows old name/appears as GUID after renaming

There’s a very common issue I’ve seen in the PVA community of powerusers.microsoft.com. Makers/developers report that after renaming their chatbot built on top of Power Virtual Agents for Teams, end users do not see the update for days or even worse - the name turns into a ‘scary’ GUID.

Bot successfully renamed however still appears to be using old name in the pinned app menu to the left. This can stay like this for days after republishing.

This behaviour only happens to the desktop client of Teams and the browser version tends to update after around 15 minutes. If it was the other way around, I’d probably suggest clearing browser cache first… and guess what? It is also a caching issue - however in this instance, we have to clear the local application cache on our machines.

Most applications and websites store cache as it’s the most efficient way to access data and files. Caching is effectively a process of storing multiple copies of data or files in temporary storage location - whether that’s your browser, or local computer - so that they can be accessed faster.

You guessed it right - the old name of your chatbot will also be cached. In order to instantly retrieve the name of your new chatbot, we will need to delete the cache and re-open our Teams client. Depending on the version of Teams you’re using and the operating system, the amount of locally cached folders may differ. Here’s the list of all the local folders where cache might be stored:

Application Cache – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\Application Cache 

Blob_Storage  – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\Blob_Storage (If there) 

Cache – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\Cache

databases – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\databases 

IndexedDb – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\IndexedDB

GPUCache  – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\GPUCache 

LocalStorage  – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\LocalStorage 

Tmp – %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\tmp 

Make sure you QUIT Teams so that it’s not running in the background, otherwise you will get a ‘file is currently open’ error when trying to delete some of the cache.

Please open the file explorer, and go to the first link from the list above as seen in the screenshot below.

Now, please delete all of the files in this folder (this is just local data, nothing will be lost - all your messages, chats etc. are stored in the cloud so you don’t have to worry about anything).

CACHE EVERYWHERE!

Please repeat this step for every folder in my list and reopen the Teams client. The new name should appear there pretty much instantly. Sorted! 😊⚒️

Side note: please note that this will need to be done individually by your users as this is updating the Teams client on your local machine only. You could consider pushing out this update by GPO to all your users/groups.