🚪 All you need to know about breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams

Via breakout rooms you can split a meeting into small groups. You can activate this new feature during your Teams meeting.

Creating and starting a breakout room in Teams

If you want to create a Breakout Room on Microsoft Teams , these video instructions are the quickest way to get started.

In Microsoft Teams you have the option of enabling a breakout room via this button.

There are 2 ways to create a breakout room. Automatic or manual.

You choose whether to assign people to the rooms manually.

If you choose Automatic, all people in the room can go. You can only add participants if the meeting has started and the room has been created.

The only person who can manage the rooms is the person who starts the meeting.

Starting a breakout room

Select -> Start rooms to open up the rooms.

The room is open when the green icon is OPEN.

If you cannot find the icon or start the breakout meeting, it is probably because you are working in the browser. Several functions are not available in the web browser. You should use the Microsoft Teams application.

Ask people to participate in a breakout room

Select "ask to join" to add participants to the room.

Which persons are present in breakout rooms?

You can see which people are in the rooms as organisers.

Make an announcement in your breakout rooms

When you open the meeting rooms, it is practical to make an announcement so that participants know that the rooms will be open.

This announcement is for all participants

Close a breakout room

Press 'close room' to close the room. From now on it is no longer possible to use it.

At the conclusion, users are notified to return to the initial meeting.

Meeting options - general

In every breakout room, the general meeting settings are the same. You can adjust that everyone is allowed to present, for example.

Meeting options - Room 1

Or you can go into the breakout room (one level down) and organise the settings specifically for each room.

Allow users to return to the default meeting?

Automatically scheduling people into a meeting or having them return are new settings that can be activated via settings.

Teams Breakout rooms Classification before the start of the meeting

In this video you can see how to add participants before the meeting starts.

How do I automatically record a Microsoft Teams breakout rooms meeting?

Only after the meeting has been created is it possible to do specific settings. In this video you can configure general settings such as bypass lobby, recordings, who can present, allow responses.

Who can be a presenter in a breakout room?

It is possible to adjust the presenter settings in the breakout room meeting settings.

Breakout rooms redistribute participants during or before the meeting

Before the launch of Breakout Rooms V2, there is another update to the breakout room functionality. Organisers can now reassign participants even if the rooms are already in use.

Previously, you could only reassign if rooms were closed. Allocations for brainstorming rooms now persist across multiple sessions. These features are useful for managing discussions efficiently and ensuring the right participants are present at each breakout. Source.

Microsoft Tech Community:

New and exciting features available for Microsoft Teams breakout rooms - Microsoft Tech Community

Also read

Tutorial: Microsoft Teams breakout rooms
How to delete a Office 365 group or distribution group with PowerShell
How to prevent users from deleting channels, tabs & apps in Teams
These are the 10 success factors when setting up Microsoft Teams

About the author

Jasper

Welcome to 365tips.be. On this website you can read articles and experiences about Office 365 with a focus on Microsoft Teams. Do you have any questions? Comment at the bottom of this blog post. Also help others by asking questions at the bottom of the articles. This blog is created in Dutch. The multilingual website is offered with best-effort machine translation.

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