Introduce breakout room functionality
We have a business requirement for breakout rooms with live events. The idea is pretty simple - we plan to use live events to host internal staff training webinars and as part of that, at times we will ask for small groups of people (typically 4-5) to go away into a breakout room and come back to the group with their answer/idea.
We would like to see this functionality be introduced to Microsoft Teams for not only live events but also video calls. This would provide feature parity with pre-existing tools such as Zoom, WebEx and many more which would be a cost saving for us.
Features we would expect as part of breakout rooms would be as follows:
- Option to assign users to a specific room
- Option to random assign users to a specific room
- Presenters/producers can switch between rooms
- Breakout rooms have a time limit for how long they last before everyone being bought back to the group
- The ability to appoint a moderator of a breakout room
- The ability to record each and every room separately (This is a dream ask)
Happy to provide more detail as required.

We are excited to announce that Breakout Rooms are now generally available for all customers. For more information, please check out our new blog post available here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/breakout-rooms-is-now-generally-available-in-microsoft-teams/ba-p/1968481
Thank you all for your feedback on this highly requested feature.
1111 comments
Comments are closed-
Anonymous commented
This would be a great way for students to work as in groups of teams then to come together to present their info.
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Anonymous commented
Excellent feature for working groups
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Adam Lien commented
This just hit our tenant!
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Anonymous commented
@Alex, we have the breakout rooms activated in our tenant but there a not so many options to work with. One of the biggest restrictions is that only the organizer can set up and manage participants in the different breakout rooms and this only when the meeting is already running ... Is something on the roadmap to extend the functionalities ?
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Anonymous commented
@Alex: Could you give us an estimation when you lunch the Virtual Breakout Rooms? In December 8 Update it's not lunched.
Thank you!
Simon -
Anonymous commented
Whats Taking so Loooooong...? October..November.. and now it´s December : /
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Anonymous commented
yes
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Anonymous commented
Will you be able to setup breakout rooms at time of scheduling or can they only be managed after the meeting starts?
Does anyone know? -
Mari commented
Hello! Is breakout rooms now launched? This feature is for Teams for Education customers or also Teams Business and Teams Free?
Thank You!
Mari -
Divya Gupta commented
I am sorry. This would create problems for teachers as many students take classes on teams.
They could try to sneak out with their friends so 'no' from my perspective. -
eric commented
it would be great if i were in a meeting with many people and i needed to talk with someone or a few people separate from the meeting to be able to set that up on the fly - while the meeting was ongoing - so that we would pop out of the meeting, chat and then return to the larger meeting... like in real life! chat is not always enough
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Anonymous commented
would like to have this feature fully operational quickly. we are hosting an event next week that is a mix of Teams Live and Team Meetings and we have presenters who are not happy that they can't do break out rooms.
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J commented
I have an entire private school company who is ready to implement breakout rooms...we need them! What is the issue? Please get this straightened out!!
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Anonymous commented
for breakout rooms, I would love to see the ability to move participants from one room to another, while the sessions are going on. Also, it would be great if organizer role could be transferred to another attendee. Lastly, if time limits could be assigned to breakout sessions, that would also be helpful
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Anonymous commented
Would it start to move?
It becomes urgent !
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Jon McNestrie commented
This is so infuriating. Teams is crippled by the lack of this feature.
I try to convince every client to use Zoom (it is a superior product for many reasons) but mostly because without Breakout rooms more collaborative workshops are much harder. I know the cheats for trying to replicate rooms but it's so much harder.
It's unforgivable how this feature continues to slip with no transparency or honesty about why or what to expect :(
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Erick commented
Hi
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Anonymous commented
Yep. Clients are starting to leave Teams for Zoom & Webex. Teams is still a useful tool for collaboration - but the Meeting experience is pushing people away to other platforms.
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Anonymous commented
Will be a god feature
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Anonymous commented
When......when......when.....will this feature be released!!! Constant shifting of release dates is infuriating.