Using breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams (new feature!)

[@davejonesconsultantsDJC]

Great video! Can your client assign you, as a trainer, access to manage breakout rooms on their Teams platform without you having administrator access to their Teams account?

[@thriveadminservices]

Thanks! In answer to your question, yes - your client can assign you as a co-organiser or presenter, and give you the rights to manage breakout rooms. However, if you aren't a part of their organisation it will depend on their own system setup as to whether people outside their organisation are allowed to be co-organisers or presenters. Teams gives you that option, but some organisations (especially those that use IT support to manage their Microsoft account) will have some limitations for security. It's worth checking that first, but generally yes. You are a guest with co-organiser or presenter access, and you can manage the rooms. Only 1 person can manage the rooms at any time, so you as the presenter/co-organiser would take over that responsibility from your client/organiser/host.

[@TheSeanBampton]

Knows everything about Teams except how to level her audio. Good grief.

[@thriveadminservices]

Hi Sean, and thanks for watching and thinking I know about bit about Teams. I'm working on improving my recordings, and hope that future ones will be easier on your ears!

[@kellystaines]

Hi, can i just check that once you hit the 'save' button when setting up your rooms it won't send people to those rooms until you select ' open''? is that correct? Thanks :)

[@thriveadminservices]

Hi Kelly, yes, the rooms are created, but won't move participants until you open them. Thanks for checking!

[@lachelhird4427]

Thanks for this. We are just moving to Teams and I'm reluctant because of the Breakout rooms. I want participants to be able to choose the breakout room they join, based on the discussion happening in the "Main" room. Is that possible? Can I manually assign everyone to each breakout room and they can choose their room? I also just received MS Teams Premium. Thanks for your help!

[@thriveadminservices]

You can manually assign people to a room, it's true, however individual participants can't choose a breakout room for themselves (it's a feature that's been requested, so may appear at some point!). The workaround would be to nominate a 'manager' for each breakout room. They have the power to reassign the rooms for members from inside the breakout room, which may avoid people coming back to the main room and requesting where to go next. Hope this helps!

[@lachelhird4427]

@@thriveadminservices Thanks I appreciate it. With over 100 participants, it's not feasible to assign or manually manage. Once Teams gets that functionality in place, I'll be able to jump. Until then- tough to do.

[@sablebenjamin3292]

Thank you for the video. How do also join a group as an organizer?

[@thriveadminservices]

Once you have created your breakout rooms, you can head to the Breakout Rooms settings in the meeting controls. Hover your mouse over the room you want to join, and select Join Room. To leave, you can select Return from the meeting controls.

[@nextstepnavigator]

This was a great video. I’ve been reluctant to move from Zoom to Teams for several reasons but the main one is that we couldn’t create breakout rooms via the web version, only the desktop has this changed now?

[@thriveadminservices]

Thanks! At this stage the breakout rooms feature is still only available on the desktop version. I'd like to think that it will soon be available on the web version, but for now I don't have a solution for you, sorry!