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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.

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Aaron Hatton shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

1112 comments

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  • KS commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    It turns out that breakout rooms (like what is provided in Zoom) are tremendously convenient for virtual hackathons as well.
    I won't share my ideas here, but I think Teams can actually provide a better UX.

  • MM commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Please add breakout rooms! My school chose TEAMS as our e-learning platform, we started online classes today without any warning or prep time. Teams works great but without the ability to separate out the class, I don't know what I will do to provide group and pair activities.

  • Graham McKendry commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Would have been a great capability yesterday during a workshop where more than half of the audience joined remotely following a last-minute option for remote attendance. We had pre-created separate "breakout" Teams meetings to run in parallel to the main Teams meeting, however the experience would have likely been more cohesive for our presenter and our proctors if there were built-in features as described in this UserVoice request.

  • S commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Totally agree. With school closed and classes online, teachers need small group and breakout options to optimize learning and student engagement in their virtual classrooms.

    Currently teachers in public school districts can't use zoom because zoom doesn't archive thus it would violate public records requests. Microsoft HQ's neighborhood public school districts would love to be a testing ground ;)

  • Lisa commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Yes, please! With so much travel being suspended right now, we could really use this feature!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Absolutely. We need this capability sooner than later especially considering travel restrictions globally.

  • Andreas commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Yes please! I work for a 5000+ organization and this is a requested feature.

  • Thomas Krecker commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I am switching 90% of the virtual workshops I organize from from Skype to Zoom, regardless of the fact, that Skype is implemented and preferred by the costumer and zoom is often restricted. The customers demand complete workshops and breakout sessions are a substantial part of it. Now in times of Corona the customers do care less about standrds but about what works. My virtual Pinboard Software does it and is synchronized with zoom. Adobe has it, though useless in other parts, Meeting to Go has it... I can add an endless list... If You google You find demands for that 5, 6, 7 Years old...

  • Danny White commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This would be extremely useful, especially for remote teaching, where students could do groupwork online and feedback to the main class at a specific time. Zoom offers this functionality already - is there are indication when this may be available for MS Teams?

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