Breakout Rooms in Teams Webcast Recording and Resources

[sambrown]

On Thursday, May 7^th, at 12 noon eastern, Microsoft Customer Success Manager Tim Hadley presented this "Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams" webcast. Since many of our customers' employees have been working from home, training that was once in-person has now moved to a virtual setting. There are three options that you can use today in Microsoft Teams to fit your virtual training needs for breakout rooms. He discussed the common use cases for breakout rooms, walked through the steps for the three options available for you to use today, and answered a ton of live questions from the audience beyond just breakout rooms. Check out the recording and resources below:

Referenced Resources:

• Slides from the presentation (attached at the bottom of this page)
• External v. guest access in Microsoft Teams
• Limits and Specifications for Microsoft Teams
• Twilio SMS Connectors
• Live Events
  • Microsoft Teams Live Event Resources
  • Microsoft Teams Live Events Webcast
• April in HLS Summary Blog
• Upcoming Microsoft Teams Security Webcast

Presenter:

• Tim Hadley, Microsoft Customer Success Manager

         

Moderators:

• Sam Brown, Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist

         

• Michael Gannotti, Microsoft Teams Principal Technical Specialist

         

Thanks for visiting!

[ThierryB]

Great video thank you ! I have to say I'm a bit disappointed because all these seems to be workarounds to create breakout rooms not a real feature that a lot's of us are expecting.

User need to be able to get breakout rooms on demand during a during without back and forth. In real life during trainings or when people need special help you can't plan this and doing a lot's of things in the background is not good for participants.

In addition this is not straight forward to see those "breakout" rooms, they is absolutely no visible link to them within the main meeting

[sambrown]

Thanks for the feedback @ThierryB - the features that you are describing are coming to Teams natively this year! This webcast was just meant for our customers that need a workaround before the official "breakout room" feature is released.

[Andy-C]

Good to know the breakout feature is coming, we hit upon option 1 and it worked fine for us.  

Option 3 also seems workable.

Issue with option 2 is do you really want a team created for every meeting like this?  In a short space of time it might get a bit crowded..

[cwanja]

Great video Tim and @sambrown. Looking to leverage option 2 on an upcoming event. One question - would individuals who do not have access to the Team still be able to join the meeting scheduled in a channel if the link was provided? Or do they need to be granted access to that Team to then be able to join a meeting scheduled in any of the channels under the Team? Thanks. 

[sambrown]

Thanks @cwanja - If a private channel meeting is happening and someone copies the meeting info and sends to someone not in that private channel, they are still able to join that meeting. Otherwise, they would need to be granted access to that private channel to access.

[Anthony Lane]

@Andy-C  I see what you mean about Option 2, but note that if it's a repeating meeting/training with different people, you can clear them all out after the meeting is done, and add new people for the next one. There is an option that stops new people in a team from seeing prior posts too. You can also clone Teams to move Channels, Settings etc. to new Teams without the original members or chat, and then archive the old ones.

The use case for option 2 is that you can get everything ready in one place before the meeting starts. Load workshop files in the channels, set the meetings for the Breakout groups to be held in those channels etc.  Then just invite everyone to the main meeting in the General Channel and send them to the breakout channels when ready.

I did the Option 1 with Skype for Business 2 years ago, and have now used Option 2 with Teams. I am looking forward to a native version which would be easier for our trainers/presenters to manage.  It needs to be pretty simple to manage, like it is in Zoom.