New Breakout Room Features for Microsoft Teams

Breakout rooms have become even better, helping you manage your meetings and fostering creativity and communication.

Breakout rooms allow organisers to divide meetings into sub-groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions. Since its launch in December 2020, Microsoft has released several new features that simplify the management and creation of breakout rooms while improving overall meeting efficiency. Let’s look at some of the innovations we have released so far.

Organisers can now reassign participants even when rooms are open, ensuring the right participants are in each breakout room and can be easily reassigned when needed. Participants also remain assigned to their breakout rooms unless the meeting organiser chooses to change them. 

New participant assignment experience

The participant assignment experience also has an updated, useful interface available both before and during meetings.

When organisers select Assign Participants in the breakout rooms’ right panel, a separate window pops up with a larger view of all the participants and rooms. Organisers can sort by participants or rooms, in addition to selecting multiple participants for room assignments. Imagine speeding up the assignment process by being able to quickly find the right participant(s) or room(s) and multi-assigning by using the checkboxes.

Room timers

Control the duration of your breakout sessions by setting up breakout room timer in the settings.

The timer is visible to the participants, counts down the time left in the room, and alerts participants 60 seconds from when the breakout room session will close. Once the timer has expired, rooms will automatically close, and participants will return to the main meeting if auto-move is enabled. Alternatively, if auto-move is disabled, a prompt is shown that allows participants to decide whether to move back to main meeting or disconnect.

Create and assign breakout rooms in advance

Get an early start by creating breakout rooms and participant assignment tasks ahead of your meeting. Simply open a Teams meeting invite, navigate to Breakout rooms, and select Create rooms. Organisers can choose how many rooms they need and create them in advance. This feature improves meeting efficiency. Additionally, organisers can perform the following tasks before the start of the meeting:

• Bulk creating or deleting rooms
• Adding, deleting, or renaming individual rooms
• Configuring meeting options for each room
• Adjusting settings (like a timer) for breakout rooms session
• Preassigning participants via both manual and automatic assignment options
• Selecting breakout rooms managers 

With the pre-meeting room feature and participant assignment, organisers can reduce last-minute setups by conducting all configurations in advance.