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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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  • Ann commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Please add this functionality. When is it planned to be released?

  • Stephan Weber commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi,

    We've just rolled out teams across our organisation which is great. The challenged - we require this for advanced use cases (e.g. online learning environments with breakout rooms), polls etc

    Is this coming? or should we revert to Webex
    Thanks

  • OMar Rivera commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    With all of the different enterprise functions, and their needs for trainings, meetings, ideation sessions, general planning, finance, development sessions etc etc etc, this should be included. Customers across the board could work differently and extract more value for this tool if we had this.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Please, please give us Breakout rooms asap otherwise we have to use Zoom for this function

  • Heather Panitch commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    When can we expect breakout rooms? We are looking to create virtual learning in teams and need that capability.

  • Jonas Rajanto commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Another supporter here. An additional feature request: give the presenter/producer/moderator access to each breakout room chat, so Q&A can be done quickly without jumping between rooms.

  • Jonathan Butt commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Good to hear its planned. Lets get this into production as in education breakout rooms are important. Not having them is pushing people to look at zoom and other tools as well

  • Beatrice commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    We are also very much looking forward to this feature becoming available in teams! Since we have offices in over 10 countries, virtual workshops and good digital communication tools are very important for us. However, due to the effort connected with training people how to use various software, we would like to stick to one solution only - if Teams had the Breakout room function it would pretty much cover all our needs in terms of meeting software.
    @Alex: can you perhaps give us some further information as per when this feature will be rolled-out?

  • Jean-Paul Remillieux commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I could not agree more with everyone else here. We've been using Adobe Connect and Zoom for education and are considering adding Teams to our toolset for online courses. But for now, we would have to maintain Zoom because group work and peer-to-peer interaction are at the heart of our online teaching strategies. Close to 90% of our instructors use breakout rooms in their live sessions. I red from Alex that Microsoft is considering adding breakout rooms to the functionalities of Teams. Do you have a timeline in mind?

  • Claire Iles commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    It would be very useful to have a feature to enable the organiser to create and manage breakout rooms on Teams. I am a trainer, and find this am excellent way to gain more interaction during a virtual training session; by having people working in smaller groups. It would also be great to enable whiteboard functionality to these breakout rooms to allow visualisation of work.

  • Brian Bozzuto commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Everyone pretty much said it, we can't adopt this fully in our organization (10,000+ people) until this sort of feature is available. The individual subscriptions to WebEx continue in the meantime.

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