Master virtual breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams meetings

[James Skay]

Join us to learn about the latest innovations with virtual breakout rooms in Teams. In this session we'll highlight use cases and best practices for facilitating small group ideation, brainstorming, learning, and discussions with virtual breakout rooms.

[#2]

@James Skay At about 9:45, why did Together Mode flip the cameras of the participants? Looks like a bug.

[#3]

@James Skay can meeting organizers prebuild the breakout rooms before people join the meeting? It'll save time if we can create sub-committees for a project.

[#4]

@mtgarden Um, maybe I should have watched the whole video before posting.... 

[#5]

Looks great and I am glad it is finally here. One question, however. I work providing training to clients and the Organizer (usually a learning and development administrator) is NEVER in the training / meeting. I am guessing that the ability to manage breakouts will also be available to a presenter if the organizer isn’t in the meeting?

[#6]

@James Skay hi, in Education (University) we would like to be able to break out students into different groups and not have their content come back for all-Team visibility. Is that possible? Essentially private work but without using private channels. We've an example at the moment of 400 students to be split into 16 break out areas and the content to remain contained within those 16 as opposed to visible to all 400. Thanks

[#7]

@Matthew P  - Great catch.  Yes, in this instance Together mode did flip the cameras around.  Since I am in an earlier ring than production, let me check with the team if this is the expected production experience. 

[#8]

@mtgarden - when we launch in October, you will need to build the breakout rooms during the initial meeting.  We are working on the ability for organizers to pre-define their breakout rooms ahead of time.  If you jump to 13:35 in the video you can see a sneak preview.

[#9]

No worries!

[#10]

Hi @Darrel Richardson.  Yes, your scenario is what we will support.  Only the assigned individual participants in the breakout rooms (including the organizer) will have access to the meeting chat, documents, whiteboard, transcripts, meeting recording, etc., that were created while in the breakout room.

[#11]

Hi @RichardN78 - to start, only the meeting organizer can create and assign breakout rooms.  In the future we will offer the ability for additional individuals to manage breakout rooms.  If you jump to ~15:40 in the video above you can see Nakul talking about and sharing this capability.

[#12]

Many thanks - I have already had discussions with clients about using the feature as soon as launched, and ways we can ensure that the trainer or their producer can also be organizer using an account from the organization.

[#13]

Not test yet

[#14]

@James Skay thanks James, so if these are not channel based (Teams based and using SharePoint), the file storage is Onedrive? So in our case we might run this for a number of years and that would be 400 participants split into 16 breakout rooms all accruing shared course work in Onedrive? We'd also have to navigate not putting in place a retention policy that zaps breakout room content prematurely. I'm hoping our Microsoft EDU colleagues will provide good community guardrail user-ed so we don't bake this into our services without knowing all the good bits and any wrinkles.

[#15]

I have a similar concern that the meeting organizer is not always the facilitator of the meeting who'll be making the break-out groups.

[#16]

@James Skay thank you for providing the video. There's an issue with the video showing on the page. It's showing a message that the video might have been moved. I was able to copy the URL from the video, and after removing the "-nocookie" from the addresss, it opens successfully from YouTube.

~Ken

[#17]

Can only bring the meeting owner all persons back to the main session?

[#18]

@James Skay Hi I was looking at the video and I am basicaly wating for the brakeout room to be lunched is there a date for it ?? 

[#19]

@James Skayhello, is it possible that breakout rooms are not available in Poland? I cant find this feature in my ms teams (desktop app)

Thanx

[#20]

@James Skay Hello 

We still cannot see breakout rooms in our organization. Please advise. I have reached out to our IT...they too are not sure.