📣 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…
- Heads Up: You will need to be a meeting organizer to see the Breakout Room button. It will be located next to the Raise Hand button (see image).
Features available for Organizer:
- 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.
Set up the new Teams meeting experience by:
- Clicking on your profile image within Teams
- Selecting Settings
- Checking the “Turn on new meeting experience” option within – General settings
- Restart your Teams client
- Making sure all participants are using the latest version of Teams
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