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Breakout Rooms for Microsoft Teams
Is Microsoft planning on creating breakout rooms for Teams meetings? If so when? I noticed a post in uservoice and it says it is planned but no timeline and I don't see it on the M365 Roadmap, so c...
Jeffrey Allen there is a roundabout way to do with as many breakout rooms / small groups as you want, but it must be set up in advance. I made a video tutorial aimed at teachers, but I've included the steps below too.
- In the Team where you want breakout rooms, create a new Channel for each breakout room.
- Open the Outlook desktop app, click into the Calendar, and then click 'New Teams Meeting' to generate a link to a new video chat.*
- Copy the 'Join Microsoft Teams Meeting' link from the Calendar invite, and paste it into the first channel / breakout room.**
- Repeat this same procedure for each breakout room / channel. It's important to generate new links for each group, or else everyone will end up in the same video chat.
- The teacher / owner of the Team can see all of the private channels and enter any breakout room they want.
Some caveats: this creates the video call as a 'Chat'--the video calls aren't being hosted within the Team itself. So any transcript of the meeting conversation will live inside the 'Chat' (not in the 'Team' itself). Additionally, while it's possible to re-use the same breakout rooms, I think anyone who has ever entered the room at any time (a) will always have access to it from the Chat tab (even if you have removed them from the private Channel), and (b) may get notifications showing the text conversations (even if you have removed them from the private Channel).
*We don't have Exchange Online accounts, but if you do, I believe step 2 can be achieved more easily without exiting Teams by clicking on the 'Meeting' button from the left-side toolbar.
**I find that it works best to paste the link into a new conversation. I tried creating a new Website tab at the top of the Channel and pasting the link, but this added some steps. When I clicked the link from the Website tab, it opened the meeting in my web browser, and then I had to click 'Open in Desktop App' (or something along those lines) before being brought into the video chat. Oddly, the only method that automatically loaded the video chat in the desktop app was pasting the link into a new conversation.
Jeffrey Allen there is a roundabout way to do with as many breakout rooms / small groups as you want, but it must be set up in advance. I made a video tutorial aimed at teachers, but I've included the steps below too.
- In the Team where you want breakout rooms, create a new Channel for each breakout room.
- Open the Outlook desktop app, click into the Calendar, and then click 'New Teams Meeting' to generate a link to a new video chat.*
- Copy the 'Join Microsoft Teams Meeting' link from the Calendar invite, and paste it into the first channel / breakout room.**
- Repeat this same procedure for each breakout room / channel. It's important to generate new links for each group, or else everyone will end up in the same video chat.
- The teacher / owner of the Team can see all of the private channels and enter any breakout room they want.
Some caveats: this creates the video call as a 'Chat'--the video calls aren't being hosted within the Team itself. So any transcript of the meeting conversation will live inside the 'Chat' (not in the 'Team' itself). Additionally, while it's possible to re-use the same breakout rooms, I think anyone who has ever entered the room at any time (a) will always have access to it from the Chat tab (even if you have removed them from the private Channel), and (b) may get notifications showing the text conversations (even if you have removed them from the private Channel).
*We don't have Exchange Online accounts, but if you do, I believe step 2 can be achieved more easily without exiting Teams by clicking on the 'Meeting' button from the left-side toolbar.
**I find that it works best to paste the link into a new conversation. I tried creating a new Website tab at the top of the Channel and pasting the link, but this added some steps. When I clicked the link from the Website tab, it opened the meeting in my web browser, and then I had to click 'Open in Desktop App' (or something along those lines) before being brought into the video chat. Oddly, the only method that automatically loaded the video chat in the desktop app was pasting the link into a new conversation.
Hi what you have put is very thoughtful but so clunky (no reflection on you but on MST). All my 'students are non-employees, and will vary with each event I run. I do so wish MST would make this a whole heap easier than it is for those of us who run workshops and small meetings across multiple organisations and as independent facilitators. dm12345
Maria64, coming in the fall, Microsoft will officially have breakout rooms as a part of Microsoft Teams. They announced this last month.
dm12345 Thanks for this. A question....when you create the links to put in the channels, won't the meetings show up for the kids in their calendars? It looked like you weren't paying a special attention to the time when creating those links. My kids depend on the date to prompt them when to join. By creating the group channels, I'm wondering if that will show up that they have 2 meetings? and be confusing with the time, especially if you re-use the links. I hope that makes sense!
Thanks for any clarification.
kstreelman, this is a great question. Our students use Gmail (we're hoping to transition them to Exchange Online soon), so I don't know as much about how Teams connects to the Outlook calendar. This is worth testing, but I think you're good to go as long as you don't add the students to the Outlook calendar/meeting invitation and simply close the calendar invite without saving. Once you copy the link, you can use it with people who haven't been specifically added to the meeting invitation. So I use the Outlook calendar meeting button only for the purpose of generating a link, and then I discard the original meeting invitation.
dm12345 I tried it today and just had the students click meet now (not available on iPads I heard) and it worked great. The only hiccup I had was there is a limit to how many rooms I can go between, but I just ended my participation in one meeting and joined another. It worked pretty well. I can't wait until this functionality is introduced for real
dm12345 Thanks for this I will test and see if I can replicate. Once I figure out how to get the right licence enabled.
dm12345, thanks for the video and steps below. One thing to add is that you can do channel moderation and you could limit conversations to moderators and restrict members to reply to channel messages from the moderators only and that can cut down on the chats and then you can have the chats area of the meeting be fore the conversations. I will relay this information to some of our staff who have been inquiring.
