Forum Discussion
Inability for External Presenters to Manage Breakouts is hurting our business in the L&D industry
JBeales I'm in the Teams org and have shared these details with our product team. Thank you for posting here. If other small businesses here want to share their experience and provide further examples, please tag me and I will continue to discuss with the team.
Hey Laura_Morgan
Our L&D department is also facing the same issue. Every time they want to manage breakout rooms, they need to jump in the training sessions because our external trainers can't manage them. Is there any update from your end if this is considered as a planned feature?- Hi Laura_Morgan, we are a non-profit organization that has online classes with external teachers that are not part of our domain. Unfortunately we have the same situation as everyone else, we cannot let external users organize breakout rooms. We’re either have to pay an employee overtime so they can manage the breakout rooms for the teachers or pay for a Zoom license. Please, please, please bring this feature to Teams.
Robert Yes, this is a massive challenge for many. I partner with learning & development departments in organizations around the globe, and hear this complaint frequently. Trying to work with external partners (vendors, contractors, freelancers, and the like) who need to run Teams meetings is a frustrating experience because they don't have access to basic needed functions like managing breakout rooms.
Other collaboration platforms (WebEx, Zoom, Adobe Connect, etc, etc.) easily allow you to promote anyone in the meeting to a "co-host" role, which gives them most meeting management privileges (including breakout rooms). This is a missing feature in Teams. In order to work effectively with freelancers, contractors, vendors, and others who are "external" presenters, we need this functionality.
Happy to chat more and share additional examples.
- Same issue from my side. We're an external training provider presenting and facilitating meetings for corporate groups inside Microsoft Teams. Almost all group facilitation requires us to manage break-out rooms.
Our current work-around is to invite clients out of their own Teams environment and into ours, but this introduces a lot of technical friction in accepting guest invites and invariably violates security policies. It also places chats into the "Guest" zone for them.
Having their IT team being able to assign us breakout room rights would be an elegant solution to a universal problem for external training providers.
