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.
Aaron Hatton
shared this idea
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.
1112 comments
Comments are closed-
Anonymous
commented
Hello,
This is sadly a reason why MS continues to fall behind. All of your competitors have this feature. It is long overdue. I hope that you can rectify this as it is a great feature and would add so much to the experience of Teams. -
Terezia Kovacs
commented
When can we expect to make this happen considering that the original post is more than 2 years old?
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Anonymous
commented
When is this *really* going to be available?
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Adam Lien
commented
@Alex, can we get an update please? The road map (65332) keeps pushing this back. This is now one of our most requested features as EOY Reviews and Evaluations are starting to occur. Thanks!
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Michael Behrisch
commented
Related Roll-out question: I was able to use the feature last week in a small meeting (the icon popped up and everything worked). Now I want to use breakout rooms in a class setting, but both times there was no button there? How does the roll-out policy work? Was I just a lucky A/B tester last week?
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Helena
commented
I understand that the testing can lead to the feature being pushed back on the roll-out. It would be really nice (and I would feel taken seriously as a user and participant in user voice), it you could let us know this information here, ideally with a few details on the reasons and the expected date.
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Phil Rigotti
commented
Will this be available for Mac OS?
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Anonymous
commented
Hi Alex, a feature we really need is like Webex has where there's an option to allow people to move themselves between breakout rooms themselves rather than manually allocating, for large workshops to reduce the admin overhead burden. Can this feature be included as an option please on the backlog? I see other similar feature requests for this - thanks!
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Anonymous
commented
From October to November to December? :/
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Lucie
commented
any update on date?
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Anonymous
commented
Very much looking forward to this feature as without it Zoom again has the edge over Teams in our setting
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Dan
commented
As an educator in a public high school, this looks unworkable. I need to set up at least three sets of breakout rooms (one for each class) in one day - I don't have the luxury of two weeks to prepare for a class. the limit of four breakouts is less than optimal - class size is typically 23-30 and many tasks/lessons require students to work in teams of three or four,
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Anonymous
commented
This feature was supposed to be GA in October 2020
Then November and now December 2020.
The delay is a major setback... :-(It is really difficult to make users understand that this can be done in zoom and not in Teams.
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Andrew
commented
this is killing teams in my business you are driving people to zoom, come on get this released guys asap - its a massive pain point
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Anonymous
commented
The roadmap now says Dec 2020, sadly. We had planned to be able to use this feature for a training for students starting Nov. 22nd. Now we have no alternative!
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Anonymous
commented
Attempting to use the breakout room as a parent volunteer to ease the load off our teachers and to give the kids some time to socialize. Found out that external email addresses wont be allowed to enter a breakout room unless the user has a Teams account (via the school or an outside organization). When will external accounts be able to be used?
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Anonymous
commented
The only reason i use Zoom is for virtual workshops where i generally need this function
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Anonymous
commented
I found an entry that for educational purposes it should already work, but unfortunately here in Austria I cannot see the icon to open breakout rooms during video conference according to the explanation in the support.microsoft.com site.
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JULIA
commented
Possible to know the planned release date in Nov?
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Harpal Nijjer
commented
It would be good to get a date when this feature is likely to be available as I am being asked by my organisation.