Inability for External Presenters to Manage Breakouts is hurting our business in the L&D industry

[JBeales]

I've raised this topic in various forums and at numerous conferences over the years, but I'm hoping we can initiate a productive dialogue here.

We operate in the L&D space, offering corporate training support for global clients across over a dozen platforms, and have been doing so since the days of Skype. Whether it's WebEx, Adobe Connect, Zoom, or another platform, the process is generally straightforward. We receive host rights, and we’re set to go.

However, Microsoft Teams is an exception. From the beginning, conducting training sessions as an external vendor on Teams has been extremely challenging. Despite some improvements over the years, one critical piece of functionality is still missing: external users cannot manage breakout rooms.

This oversight is severely impacting our business, as well as many other small businesses like ours, as our corporate clients transition to Teams. Many organizations move to the Microsoft ecosystem partly due to their InfoSec policies, making the issuance of internal organization credentials difficult and often necessitating additional hardware.

It's not just external vendors who are frustrated. Many of our clients, including the L&D departments of Fortune 500 companies, have actively opposed their companies' transition to Teams.

We want to embrace these transitions and even endorse and encourage them. Is this functionality on the roadmap? Who do we need to speak to, or what actions are required to fully address this issue? We are eager to discuss the friction points of using Teams for training from the perspective of a company that has facilitated and supported hundreds of thousands of trainings across every major platform over the last decade.

Your thoughts and insights would be greatly appreciated.

[#2]

@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. 

[#3]

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.

[#4]

Hi @Laura_Morgan 

Same issue here. In our company (more than 200K employees) 80% of our instructors are externall users from many different partners and vendors. We stilll deliver some training sessions via Zoom because of the break out rooms and the simultaneous translation. I have been requesting this to our IT area with no answer at all.

We cannot manage to add external instructors as guest into the tenant as we have a few thousands instructors, so no way to manage this amount of requests with our IT area.

We have a custom integrtarion of Teams with our LMS, so we can manage to automatically create Teams meetings, retrieve the attendance reports and close the roaster in our LMS, saving a lot of FTE's. So because of that, it's quite important not only to give the capability to external users to create breakout rooms, but to solve the issue with the Graph API to retrieve the attendance report. Nowadays it does not return the time users spend in breakout rooms.

So, what it's really needed is:
-Give external users the option to create breakout rooms.
-Make the Graph API to retrieve attendance reports including the breakout rooms time
-Solve the issues with simultaneous translation.

There are some others Teams features to be improved, but those 3 are the critical ones for us.

[#5]

@Laura_Morgan 

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.  

[#6]

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