How to use breakout rooms in Teams

In the world of modern work, we must adapt to a changing landscape and offer sustainable solutions to everyday challenges. With something as simple as breaking out people into huddles or groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions, collaboration, and workgroups, this has become difficult in a distributed environment.

Some conferencing solutions had a fix for this, breakout rooms. A breakout room is a simple concept, starting with one main meeting and then creating groups of smaller breakouts that can be controlled by the original organizer. Users can be distributed in groups automatically or manually. Then when the breakout is over the smaller meetings are closed and then everyone joins back to a main meeting. This concept can often be seen in the education environment however, it has application within the work anywhere culture of the modern business environment.

While Microsoft Teams is a complete solution for most, this one capability created a challenge for some users or groups wanting to adopt the platform. This week at Microsoft Ignite, many updates for Microsoft Teams have been announced, including breakout rooms for Microsoft Teams – generally available in October 2020. We are excited about the inclusion of breakout rooms within Microsoft Teams meetings and many of the other updates for Microsoft Teams.

As an early adopter of Microsoft Teams and an active participant in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), we have been testing the Teams breakout rooms for a while and we can honestly say, it is great. The controls are there, it’s easy to use, and turning any meeting into a breakout meeting is as easy as pressing a button and selecting how many rooms you want.

Rooms can be individually named, and users easily assigned. Visibility into each group is simple, and an admin can easily drop into different rooms to check in on discussion or give assistance. All of course with the security and audio quality you have come to love from Microsoft Teams.

The release of Teams breakout rooms allows organizers to split up participants into smaller groups and travel between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, enable collaboration and coauthoring completed during the breakout to be shared back to the larger meeting and close the rooms to return everyone to the main meeting.

Contact Us for more information or to get started with Microsoft Teams.

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