Co-Organisers

Copper Contributor

Great work with the Co-Organisers within Teams Meeting Options.  Are there plans to also include the control of the Breakout rooms to Co-Organisers without the Organiser having to set them up first and give others control?  Could this be added as a Check Box to the Meeting Options?  It's very annoying when the Organiser hasn't given others Breakout room controls and they lose connection whilst the breakout rooms are open and in use.  Teams effectively take all members of the Breakout Rooms hostage.  The only way to get them back is for someone to email all delegates and ask them to come back manually.  I'm not always around to be able to log on as the Organiser and rescue the hostages! Can we have a button please :)

14 Replies
Hello, have you used the Presenter role to appoint breakout rooms managers or is that what you don't think is sufficient? Can be done before and during a meeting.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-breakout-rooms-in-teams-meetings-7de1f48a-da07-466c-a...

@ChristianJBergstrom Thanks for the suggestion.  We use Live Teams Meetings in a different way to most.  I'm generally organising between 8-20 Teams Meetings for others in their Diaries a week.  We don't have the time to get the organiser to go in and do this in advance, we have tried it and do it where we can but it's something that gets missed.  I don't think I'm asking too much.  If you have organised a Teams Meeting for 100 delegates and the Organiser if off sick that day, we still need to run from the original invitation that was sent out, up to 6-7mths in advance, as this is the link all the attendees will have.

@Emily Kirby is very knowledgeable when it comes to the breakout rooms. Let's see if we might get a reply or suggestion here (as I don't really use the breakout rooms).

Hi Christian,

Let's hope so, we've been using Breakout Rooms before they were even a "thing". In the early days we had Parent Teams with sub-channels as Breakout Rooms, can you imagine trying to explain how to move rooms to a group of 30 people who's use of computers only extended as far as FB and maybe Ebay! It was like herding cats!

@Russ1976 

Suggestion (Workaround): Use a functional account to set up those meetings (from Outlook on the Web [Outlook desktop does not work if there is another main account logged in into, as the meeting organizer in the view for the meeting options is always the main account] or Teams Desktop/Web [functional account logged into]), then share the credentials of this functional account with the "personal" organizer. Then the meeting is not dependent to that "personal" organizer.

As implemented, it still doesn't address the problem of the original organizer left the company.  It does help on a much smaller problem of delegation.

Thanks for the ideas guys and yes, if it were only 1 or 2 users with a couple of Teams meetings a week that would be slightly manageable.
We can have up to 30 x 8hr Teams meetings a week (Mon-Fri) with an average of 25 delegates and the Presenter/Host and support staff in each and a minimum of 4 break out rooms per session.
Could you imagine what the Chat would be like in the master account! All Hosts/Support Staff would also require dual access to both the "Master" login and their own personal login, to keep up with live session chat and their own non-session related work threads. This doesn't take into account that only 40% of the hosts actually know how to use the tech properly!

@Russ1976 you are setting it up too complicated. only the support staff would need to login into the functional account. If you want, we could talk regarding this approach.

I appreciate the offer Matthias but just too busy atm. There are only the 2 support staff for what will soon be 9 Presenters.
All we want is a button, or to have Breakout Room control given to who I set up as Presenters when setting up the Teams meetings in Outlook in whoever's diary. The best back-up that we have at the minute is me accessing the account of the effected meeting as the owner and handing over controls to another presenter that way. It's not something that happens often and changing the way that we set-up the invitations would be an administrative nightmare 🤯 Would be happy to chat in email though if I'm missing a trick :)
in a word: Microsoft won't and don't have plan to give us this feature now

technically it's easy peasy, becasue it's something about managment which we don't deserve the truth

@Russ1976 Well normally we set it up like this:

One functional account as meeting organizer, this account has all organizer features and could be shared between multiple people if needed. This account defines the presenters and breakout room manager before the meeting. During the meeting, all presenters can raise other presenters, and the breakout room managers can manage their breakout rooms. If additional breakout room managers are needed, a supporter can log in into the functional account and assign additional managers.

I like this, it still requires the organiser to go into each room and assign one of the presenters to have breakout control as the organiser/support staff aren't in all meetings at all times. This adds to additional admin pressure/time that could be utilised more productively.

As for the other user comment ( AnqB0VVRetc), hmmmm, maybe that's right, or maybe they just don't know it's something we would like. I think MS have been quite responsive to Live Meetings/Events requests from the community!
Breakout room Presenter can be assigned beforehand from the organizer as well via the roomsettings of the breakout rooms
The Organiser and Support Staff are one and the same person, we aren't a huge Org. The process that you have to go through means that person is opening 30 odd rooms one after the other after the other at least once a week (1200 rooms a year). My guy's time can be put to much better use than that for the sake of adding it to Co_Presenter rights.
As I said, our current fix is still the quickest/process friendly.