Forum Discussion
Breakout Rooms for Microsoft Teams
Jeffrey Allen there is a roundabout way to do with as many breakout rooms / small groups as you want, but it must be set up in advance. I made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo6yqh7erEY&hd=1 aimed at teachers, but I've included the steps below too.
- In the Team where you want breakout rooms, create a new Channel for each breakout room.
- Open the Outlook desktop app, click into the Calendar, and then click 'New Teams Meeting' to generate a link to a new video chat.*
- Copy the 'Join Microsoft Teams Meeting' link from the Calendar invite, and paste it into the first channel / breakout room.**
- Repeat this same procedure for each breakout room / channel. It's important to generate new links for each group, or else everyone will end up in the same video chat.
- The teacher / owner of the Team can see all of the private channels and enter any breakout room they want.
Some caveats: this creates the video call as a 'Chat'--the video calls aren't being hosted within the Team itself. So any transcript of the meeting conversation will live inside the 'Chat' (not in the 'Team' itself). Additionally, while it's possible to re-use the same breakout rooms, I think anyone who has ever entered the room at any time (a) will always have access to it from the Chat tab (even if you have removed them from the private Channel), and (b) may get notifications showing the text conversations (even if you have removed them from the private Channel).
*We don't have Exchange Online accounts, but if you do, I believe step 2 can be achieved more easily without exiting Teams by clicking on the 'Meeting' button from the left-side toolbar.
**I find that it works best to paste the link into a new conversation. I tried creating a new Website tab at the top of the Channel and pasting the link, but this added some steps. When I clicked the link from the Website tab, it opened the meeting in my web browser, and then I had to click 'Open in Desktop App' (or something along those lines) before being brought into the video chat. Oddly, the only method that automatically loaded the video chat in the desktop app was pasting the link into a new conversation.
James Skay, Nydia Cavazos, Yousaf Sajid, Karuana_Gatimu_MSFT, wanted to follow up on my post and see if anyone knows if this is being planned and what the timeline is? THANKS!!!!! I think this would not only be a great feature for Teams but even more so with so many remote workers during this coronavirus crisis.
Jeffrey Allen I completely agree with you. This is even more needed in these C-19 days. If zoom can do it so can MS fingers crossed
Malene280 As someone who uses both, Zoom is INFINITELY better with breakout rooms, starting with the fact that you can create automatic immediately breakout rooms. With Teams you have to manually create them, which you can only do after you have everyone in the meeting. Zoom lets you create them automatically or manually. As someone who frequently facilitates training, I absolutely DESPISE manual breakouts. That Microsoft hasn't implemented this simple feature in Teams just boggles my mind. For that reason alone, I hate to use Teams versus Zoom.
yes and zoom have been doing it for years
Malene280, I agree and daily now, I'm being asked to consider moving us to Zoom because of this especially in light of the Coronavirus and us all working from home.
Breakout rooms would be greatly beneficial. We've been using BlueJeans for several years, before Zoom was even around. It works well, breakout rooms are a newer feature and will be good during these times.
R_Legal - this functionality would be extremely useful - I'm trying to push Teams as I feel like it is the best solution going forward with the integration of existing Microsoft products, but this is a must-have as we want to offer a similar experience to an in-person meeting and all of our stakeholders will be on separate connections! I think we will be reverting to Zoom or WebEx due to this lack of functionality (hopefully not for long...)!
