Microsoft Teams continues to improve and introduce new features. Breakout Rooms are now available in Microsoft Teams. Here are the highlights from the Microsoft announcement.

Breakout rooms make it easy to divide your meetings into sub-groups to facilitate smaller discussions, brainstorming sessions, learning groups, and even holiday mixers.

Organizers can jump in between meetings on their own, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. And unique to Microsoft Teams, breakout rooms can be initiated both in Microsoft Teams channels and in Microsoft Teams meetings to give you flexibility on how you want to meet. Breakout rooms are especially great this time of year for mixing and mingling and playing games during a virtual holiday party.

The meeting organizer can create up to 50 breakout rooms and choose to automatically or manually assign participants into rooms. The organizer can start a breakout room in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility on how you want to meet.

Using the breakout room settings, the meeting organizer can choose to allow participants to come back to the main meeting at any time, then return to the assigned breakout room. This way participants can ask a clarifying question without disturbing the breakout room discussions.

Also, organizers can use the setting to re-create breakout rooms in the same meeting. This allows them to assign participants into new room setups.

Since breakout rooms are Teams meetings, all the innovation that makes Teams meetings inclusive, interactive, and intelligent are available within. Attendees can discuss a topic in their breakout room while in a virtual coffee shop in Together mode. Or students can bring up the Microsoft Whiteboard and draw out their ideas. This is also true of our security features that help make your Teams meetings a safe and secure place to meet.

FAQ for Breakout Room for Microsoft Teams

Who can start a breakout room?

Only the meeting organizer can start breakout rooms.

How can I use breakout rooms?

The meeting organizer can start a breakout room on the desktop client only.

Participants can join a breakout room from desktop, web or mobile. Microsoft Teams Rooms do not have breakout room capabilities yet.

Participants logged in from multiple devices will have all end points join the same breakout room.

How do I make sure I can start using breakout rooms?

Make sure that the new meeting experience is enabled (Teams -> Settings -> General -> Check “Turn on new meeting experience”)

Check and make sure you have the latest Teams updates

IT admins can check how often their tenants get updates, which may impact when their users receive new features like breakout rooms

I’m an educator, what will my students be able to do?

Educators will have the option to push students into the breakout rooms and pull them back to the main meeting, without any additional action needed by the student.

Students can be assigned to breakout rooms, join breakout rooms, use the whiteboard or screen share if allowed to in normal school meetings, re-join the main meeting, and see their breakout room chat.

Since breakout rooms are Teams meetings, the same security policies and options apply to the breakout room.