Highlights of Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft has been teasing a feature for Microsoft Teams over the last few months and it’s finally beginning to roll out: Breakout Rooms. If you don’t already have it available, you will soon be able to break-up a group meeting into smaller groups. One use case for this could be a training session where people can break-up into teams to work on tasks before rejoining the main meeting. Let’s walk through some highlights of breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams!

Controls and Settings

We begin from within a meeting.  As you can see, I have a meeting started in my Teams general channel.

At the top, you’ll see a new icon for “Breakout rooms.”

You are then presented with the option of setting up the number of rooms you want to have and you can choose to manually add members or split the group up automatically.

Once you make your selections, the rooms will appear and members can start joining those rooms.

The Breakout Experience

There are additional settings where you choose to automatically move people to open rooms or let people rejoin the main meeting.

You also have the ability to assign individuals to a specific room.

You have the ability to add rooms and start or open a room for use.

By default, the rooms are named “Room” with a number at the end. You can rename them to be more meaningful.

Finally, attendees can hit the return button to rejoin the main meeting.

Conclusion

In the past, if you wanted to have breakout sessions for your meeting, you likely would setup a channel for each breakout and start a meeting within that channel. With Breakout Rooms, you can do that all from one location; easily control when they are opened or closed, and pop in and out of meetings with fewer clicks. If you have Breakout Rooms, give it a try! To learn more ways to collaborate with colleagues or improve productivity, please feel free to reach out to us at any time.