Forum Discussion
Breakout Rooms for Microsoft Teams
Is Microsoft planning on creating breakout rooms for Teams meetings? If so when? I noticed a post in uservoice and it says it is planned but no timeline and I don't see it on the M365 Roadmap, so checking here. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/35000044-introduce-breakout-room-functionality
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.
91 Replies
Jeffrey AllenAlso looking for breakout rooms in Teams… 😞
Any workaround until MS Will release the functionality?
I'm exploring creating different channels within a team, for each room….Manu_Lanuza and Jeffrey Allen have a look at the workaround that some of our Science Teachers discovered for this. It is a bit more set up on the front end of a Teams Meeting, but works way better than Zoom's breakout rooms (which can only record the main room but not what's on in the breakout sessions). Note: In order to achieve the editing pencil in #3 you need to post something to the chat (i.e. expectations, instructions, etc.). Have a look and please share!
BongeJoe, thanks for this breakdown. I have created group chats before but didn't think of this as a way for breakout rooms. I'll pass this along to the others. I've been posting all of the various options that have been posted here to a Teams 101 channel. Still hoping for official breakout room features but this and the others are great! Microsoft is more secure than Zoom and more compliant so I'd rather stick with Teams than go with Zoom!
Hi Jeffrey Allen,
Any response on this from Microsoft? I'm probably going to sign up for Zoom for my organisation in the mean time.
Regards,
Bill
Billsmi what about the security issues that have been reported in relation to Zoom? Also the user experience is sub-par
- I have not heard anything from Microsoft on this and I wish they would weigh-in.
Jeffrey Allen Hi I have been reading your string of comments re breakout rooms. Yep microsoft is way behind the times and Zoom is leading the way. We even managed to breakout into groups of six in our Zoom delivered church meeting on Sunday! I lead mid-sized workshops for the NHS and given that social distancing is going to continue for the remainder of the year I absolutely need a facility that provides a 'breakout' function in a day long or two day workshop scenario. I'm very disappointed in microsoft. The lack of responsiveness to the thread of this conversation by microsoft is poor show. No point in facilitating conferences for upto 250 people and not have a breakout facility. Come on Microsoft give us some idea before I too opt to spend my £ with Zoom.
- @Jeffrey_Allen I am also interested in finding out if there is timeline or plan to introduce breakout rooms to MS Teams. We are just starting to use Teams to teach online and with large cohorts that you want to have group discussions within a session, rather than as a separate session, break out rooms are a must.
Been looking for this feature as well! Should we be creating separate Teams to emulate breakouts? My issues is the cascading and sharing the same information to the larger groups based on the work the sub groups complete. Namely work done in a subTeam rolls up to the larger Team. Then I feel I can make "breakout work".
Jeffrey Allen I just wanted to add my support for this ask. I will plan on transitioning my class to online for this fall. I was hoping to use Teams, because of the university's support for MS products, but, my classroom has group work and we will need breakout rooms.
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.
