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.
I’ve read through the suggestions here. There are some good ones! As I see it, there are three different workarounds for having breakout rooms in Teams:
1. Use channels
This would require a team to exist with the people in it you need for the session..
For it to work, you would create the needed channels and then just add a scheduled meeting in each channel. No need to go to Outlook calendar for that, just schedule the meeting directly in Teams.
Great if it’s a class, but maybe a bit overkill to create a whole team, if it’s only for one meeting with people who wouldn’t otherwise interact.
2. Schedule x different meetings
Use Teams or Outlook to schedule x different simultaneous meetings. Send out the links to all participants and when the time comes, just tell them to go to the appropriate meeting and use it like a breakout.
This way you don’t need to create a team. Just use Outlook and you could even invite people to all of the breakouts or only select people so as to distribute them in advance.
3. Call up from a group chat
You could simply create a group chat for each group that need to talk to each other and then have them add voice - or you could have them create the group chat themselves. The advantage of you creating the chat is you can jump around.
This approach has more of an ad hoc feel and still doesn’t require a team and channels,
I do agree, however, that a more native way of supporting breakout rooms for a given meeting would be good, just as long as it doesn’t make the UI overly complex. But I also do feel like there ARE workarounds that could work.
I’d love to hear thoughts about these suggestions, as I must admit I haven’t tried any of them yet.