Hello everyone,
A descriptive post on an highly expected feature for meetings in Microsoft Teams. Here is an article to summarize what Breakout Rooms are and how you can benefit from it.
Improving you meeting experience with impactful features, you can know divide your Teams meetings attendees in smaller groups. This feature is pretty much like, in real life, when you create focus groups during a brainstorming meeting. You might also want to use productivity hacks like topic groups where contributors can move between topics to stimulate overall outcomes. A pretty nice feature for the education world as well, I plan to test it for my online trainings 😋
How it works
Once in a meeting, you select the breakout room icon on the top right of the screen. This will land you to the configuration panel :
This configuration panel will provide you with options to create an amount of rooms for your meeting, and an assignment method.
You can choose to automatically assign attendees to room, this will show you a preview for the repartition before you click ok :
The process of manually assign attendees to breakout rooms is achievable using the top menu. You will find attendees and be able to select a room :
Once you are ready to start your breakout room sessions, beware that the rooms have a lifecycle. They start with the Closed status, you can start them by selecting Start Rooms.
At this moment every assigned attendees will be redirected to a ‘new meeting’, they can use the whiteboard as well as screensharing like regular meetings.
If someone join after the session has started, you will have to manually assign a breakout room to that person.
Meeting organizer can switch between rooms, but attendees cannot choose a breakout room. This might change in the future.
Once you started the breakout room session, you are free to move from a room to another :
You might notice that every room is equipped with a chat, file, note and whiteboard which provides a wide range of tools for the session :
Note that you can start the breakout rooms creation process over and over during a meeting.
This is all for this feature, I hope you found useful information on this post. See you soon in the blog section !
