New! Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams

📣  Breakout Rooms are coming to Microsoft Teams in early December 2020! Here’s the scoop on how to use it, hot off the presses from Microsoft’s communication to admins…

• Breakout room setup on Teams desktop client
• Create breakout rooms in scheduled private meetings (including recurring) and private meet now meetings
• Meeting organizers can manage rooms and hop between rooms freely
• Setup breakout rooms during an active meeting
• Create up to 50 breakout rooms in a single meeting
• Add, remove, delete breakout rooms
• Rename rooms to the title of your choice
• Reassign room participants from one room to another before as well as while the rooms are open
• Room transition: as an organizer, you can decide if participants get moved to the room automatically when you open the room, or, if they need to click to confirm the move. The “auto-accept” setting is available per meeting.
• Send an announcement that will show up as a meeting chat message in each room.
• Chats, files, and recordings: only the organizer will always have access to all rooms meeting artifacts

Features available for the participants:

• Join breakout rooms from web, desktop, iOS, iPads, Android mobiles and tablets. Note that organizers cannot move participants who joined via Desk phones or Teams devices join to a breakout room, they can stay in main meeting as their breakout room.
• Participants join the room as presenters, so they can present, share Whiteboard, etc. freely.
• Participants cannot add others to meeting chat, copy meeting details, nudge others to the meeting, or use “call me back”
• Hoping between rooms: Meeting participants cannot hop back to main meeting or between rooms on their own. They must wait for the meeting organizer to pull them back to the main meeting.
• Chat during the breakout session. Chat and artifacts shared during meeting are viewable for room participants.
• Chats, files, and recordings: Participants have access to artifacts, but only organizer has access to the links – if link is shared by meeting organizer, then participants will have access
• Multi-device join: breakout room is not supported when the participant joins the same meeting and same account from multiple devices

Where and when can I set up breakout rooms?

• You can set up breakout rooms after you join the meeting as the organizer. You can bulk create rooms at the start, or manually add or remove rooms.
• You can set up breakout rooms from desktop client, but not in mobile and web.
• We plan to enable the ability for you to set up breakout rooms before the meeting very soon.

When can I assign participants to breakout room?

• You can assign participant when you are setting up the rooms. You can do so manually before the rooms open or reassign participants to a different room while the room is open.
• You can also auto-assign the participants to rooms when you first set up the rooms in the meeting.

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