[GA'ed] Now in public preview: Presenter support in breakout rooms

[Kaushal Mehta (LYNC)]

Description

We have added the ability for a meeting organizer to extend the management of breakout rooms to specified presenters.

This feature will allow a meeting organizer to add/remove presenters as breakout rooms managers. By taking control from breakout rooms management panel, appointed presenters are able to perform breakout room operations as manager/meeting organizer, and join rooms as a breakout room manager.

Flighting status

Now available to everyone in Public Preview. To be able to use this feature, meeting organizer and breakout rooms managers need to be in Public Preview. Attendees are not required to have Public Preview enabled.

 

How to enable

Organizers who are configuring and managing breakout rooms on a Teams desktop client have the ability to appoint presenters as breakout room managers in breakout rooms settings. Breakout room managers are not assignable to rooms, instead they can move freely between rooms.

Currently, only users who are named presenters from the same tenant can become breakout rooms managers.

When breakout rooms managers join the meeting, they will see Breakout rooms icon in toolbar. Breakout rooms managers will have to take control to manage rooms. (Only one manager can manage rooms at any given time).

Once in control, breakout rooms managers can perform operations to manage breakout rooms, such as:

• assign users to rooms,
• add/delete rooms,
• open/close rooms
• (re)assign users to rooms
• send announcements
• recreate rooms
• set timer
• adjust other breakout rooms settings
• join open rooms.

When rooms are started, the breakout room manager who is in control can join any open breakout rooms by clicking on the ‘...’ menu next to each room and selecting ‘Join room’.

Note: If you need additional information about enabling the public preview itself, please see “Enable the public preview for Teams” below.

 

Microsoft 365 workloads and dependencies

Product, workload, or area	Dependency (Yes/No)	If yes, version requirements and other dependencies
Exchange	No
SharePoint, files	No
Skype for Business	No
Outlook add-in	No
Azure AD	No
OneDrive	No
Office	No

Supported clients and platforms

Windows 10	macOS	iOS	Android	Linux	Chrome	Firefox	Safari	Edge	Internet Explorer
X	X

 

Known issues

None

 

Known limitations

• Only explicitly invited presenters will be available for assignment as breakout rooms managers.
• Breakout room managers who are not in control should first request control, by clicking on “Manage rooms” button in Breakout rooms pane, before being able to join rooms (by accessing the ‘...’ menu next to each room and selecting ‘Join room’).
• Only in-tenant presenters are available for assignment as breakout rooms managers. 
• The number of breakout room managers is limited to 10.
• People joining as attendees and being promoted to presenters from roster cannot be made managers, even if explicitly invited.

Enable your Teams client for the public preview 

1. IT admins need to set an update policy that turns on ‘Show preview features’. Learn how at Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.  
2. Users choose to join the public preview individually. Learn how at  Get early access to new Teams features - Office Support (microsoft.com)

 

Summary of public preview features

For a history of features in the Office and Teams public previews, see Release Notes Current Channel (Preview) - Office release notes | Microsoft Docs.

Send us your feedback 

Got feedback on features in the public preview or other areas of Teams? Let us know straight from Teams via Help > Give feedback.

Thank you,

Preview Team, @Jan_Steberl 

Quality & Customer Obsession, Microsoft Teams

[#2]

Thank you for the update

[#3]

Thank you for the update. This is a great feature.

It would also be very useful to have attendees of breakout rooms to be able to self-allocate and move themselves freely between breakout rooms like you can do in Zoom. This would allow for large flexible planning sessions and other large events and currently is holding me back from using Teams for these kinds of events as easily as other tools (Zoom, WebEx Training Center). There are a lot of feature suggestions on uservoice for this but each has a smaller number of votes. Could you please review (e.g. search for move between rooms brings them up) and consolidate so that one suggestion item better reflects the number of votes and consider this enhancement? Thank you

[#4]

Thank you! This is a very anticipated enhancement in our organization, so we appreciate the update.

[#5]

Hi, thank you for your interest in Breakout rooms in Teams and your feedback. Yes, we track this feature ask under https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/41478703-self-selecting-breako.... Team is looking into it.

[#6]

We would like to give people a list of questions for each breakout room. Other than in an announcement to all rooms, is there a way to maybe post a file in each room with the list of questions?

[#7]

@Jan_Steberl Thank you for your feedback - please could votes from other similar requests of the same topic be merged in to track centrally against this feature request as one & the same?

[#8]

We just tested this feature out. It works as described, but we found the user experience very unsatisfactory. Our specific use case is multiple teachers managing an online class.

• Requiring the meeting organiser to give breakout room manager rights (BORMR) to individual presenters as  separate process is inconvenient. If a teacher is the organiser, it gives an extra layer of admin for them to do either during or in advance of the class. If an administrator is the organiser, then there needs to be complicated communication between the teachers and administrator to ensure this happens before the class starts. Perhaps there could be a way of setting this up when the meeting is set up?
• It is often important for co-teachers/co-facilitators to be able to move between break-out rooms freely. Combining this feature with the BORMR is not adequate:
  • It is very inconvenient and unintuitive to have to take control when you want to move between rooms
  • It is very inconvenient that only one teacher at a time can move between rooms
  • When a presenter (1) with BORMR has moved to a room and another presenter (2) takes over BORMR and closes the rooms, Presenter 1 is thrown out of the meeting altogether. 

We won't be able to recommend this feature to our colleagues in its current state, I'm afraid.

[#9]

Is there a suspected date when this will be available for GCC.

[#10]

@KeLaw83 - The public roadmap item for this feature covers both commercial and GCC. I'm hoping it will only lag behind by a week or two. It should hopefully hit GCC by end of October or early November according to the message center post.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=presenter%2Csupport%2Cbre...

[#11]

Hi Kaushal, can you provide some more detail on the assignment process and UI when assigning this new role when scheduling the meeting?

As a meeting organizer, where do I make someone an "appointed presenter" and then a "break out room manager" WHEN SCHEDULING or BEFORE the meeting starts?

[#12]

We use a "work around" to pre-populate breakout room whiteboards before meetings. As the organizer I have another person "join" the future meeting via the link in the meeting. Then I assign that person to the breakout room, start the room, open the whiteboard, populate the board with questions, close the room. Repeat for each room. The other attendee doesn't actually have to be active while I do this, just signed into the meeting. It take a few minutes per room. Then when the actual meeting starts, assigned participants open the Whiteboard in each breakout room and the questions are posted on the Whiteboard for them to use. Not the most efficient solution, but works well for our purposes.

[#13]

When will external guests be able to manage breakout rooms and not just explicitly assigned internal presenters? Most of our breakout rooms need to be managed by external guest moderators so users are using zoom instead for their meetings.

[#14]

Does this feature work well with guests?

[#15]

@AnaCHC from my testing you can not make a guest a room manager.

[#16]

@blue_manthanks. What I am wondering is if there are any issues when an in-tenant breakout group manager allocates guest users to a breakout room.

[#17]

Excited to hear when multiple breakout rooms managers can manage rooms at the same time 🙂
Is this a planned feature? If yes, when?
Keep up the great work!
/E