Breakout sessions in Teams
- Mark Kolodziej
Breakout rooms can be a great tool for meetings. Want to add them to your Microsoft Teams meeting, but are unsure of how to do so? Read on!
Setting up breakout rooms can take some time. It is recommended that you leave yourself a few minutes to set them up before they are needed.
To set up breakout rooms for a given meeting, you must be in that meeting. This cannot be done without entering the meeting, and you must be on the Teams desktop client app, not the web app.
Instructions
Inside your Microsoft Teams meeting, click the Breakout room button which resembles a small square inside of a larger square.
On the new menu, select how many breakout rooms to create (1-50) and if you would like to automatically assign participants to the breakout rooms or do so manually.
Your rooms will appear on the right-hand side of your screen. By moving your cursor over a room and selecting the three horizontal dots, you can perform various actions such as opening/closing or renaming the room.
By default, all rooms are closed and must be started. Do so by clicking Start rooms next to “Manage rooms”. All attendees assigned to a breakout room will be pulled out of the main meeting and into their breakout rooms automatically.
Useful tips
If you are the meeting organizer and you join a breakout room, you must click Resume from the top toolbar when you rejoin the main meeting.
People can be moved between breakout rooms by clicking the checkbox next to their name, clicking Assign and then selecting the destination room.
By clicking the three dots at the top, you can change the general meeting room settings and also delete and recreate the breakout rooms.
You can send announcements to all breakout rooms by clicking the three dots next to the meeting room name and selecting Make an announcement. Note: you can only do this after starting the breakout rooms.