Introducing Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms

Take your collaboration to the next level with breakout rooms for Microsoft Teams

Breakout rooms are perfect for meeting organisers to split attendees into smaller groups for discussions and brainstorming sessions.

We are excited to announce that breakout rooms will be available this week in Microsoft Teams.

Up to 50 breakout rooms can be created by meeting organisers with the option to manually or automatically assign participants to rooms. Meeting organisers can start a breakout from a Teams meeting or Teams channel meeting, giving you flexibility on how you want to meet.

From the breakout room settings, meetings organisers have the option to allow participants to rejoin the main meeting room at any point and then return to their breakout room. This allows participants to ask clarifying questions without disturbing the breakout room sessions.

The meeting organiser can create, rename, and delete rooms as needed.

When breakout rooms are open, organisers can join any of the sessions, quickly switching between breakout rooms as needs arise. You can also switch breakout room attendees.

As an organiser you can send announcements to the breakout rooms and also recall your participants back to the main meeting.

Since breakout rooms are Teams meetings, all the innovation that makes Teams meetings inclusive, interactive, and intelligent are available within. Attendees can discuss a topic in their breakout room while in a virtual coffee shop in Together mode. Or students can bring up the Microsoft Whiteboard and draw out their ideas. This is also true of the security features that help make your Teams meetings a safe and secure place to meet.

Files created when in the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting once everyone is back together, further driving collaboration and idea sharing.

FAQ

Who can start a breakout room?

• Only the meeting organiser can start breakout rooms.

How can I use breakout rooms?

• The meeting organiser can start breakout rooms at any point but they must be using the desktop version of Teams.
• Participants can join a breakout room from desktop, web or mobile. Microsoft Teams Rooms do not have breakout room capabilities yet.
• Participants logged in from multiple devices will have all end points join the same breakout room.

How do I make sure I can start using breakout rooms?

• Make sure that the new meeting experience is enabled (Teams -> Settings -> General -> Check “Turn on new meeting experience”)
• Check and make sure you have the latest Teams updates 
• IT admins can check how often their tenants get updates, which may impact when their users receive new features like breakout rooms