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
Any update on when this is coming online?
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MM commented
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.
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Graham McKendry commented
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.
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S commented
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 ;)
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Anonymous commented
We need this as well. Have to use Zoom now...
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Anonymous commented
This is now urgent given the travel restrictions in place right now!
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Lisa commented
Yes, please! With so much travel being suspended right now, we could really use this feature!
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Anonymous commented
Looking forward to seeing this function soonest as now it becomes a basic need.
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Anonymous commented
This is requested feature!
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Anonymous commented
Absolutely. We need this capability sooner than later especially considering travel restrictions globally.
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Anonymous commented
Zoom offers this functionality and we urgently need it
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Andreas commented
Yes please! I work for a 5000+ organization and this is a requested feature.
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Phil Vincent commented
I can see from the post by Admin (Alex) on Jan 14 that this functionality is planned, when might it be added to the Roadmap (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap) so that we can track it's status/progress?
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Lachlan Musicman commented
Adding our request to this list. We would use this yesterday.
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Thomas Krecker commented
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...
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Carol Szymke Mulford commented
When is the planned release date for teams break out functionality?
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Danny White commented
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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Anonymous commented
Really surprised that this feature is not implemented yet.
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Anonymous commented
Any more news on when?
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KSS commented
When is the breakout room functionality coming?