Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Team

A breakout room enables you to split a group audio or video call into divergent sessions. Let’s say you are in a conference with 16 colleagues, across marketing, sales, and billing and customer support. The breakout room feature would allow the marketing and sales teams to break out into a separate discussion, while the primary meeting continues as scheduled. Terminating one session has zero impact on concurrent meeting tracks.

How to create and manage breakout rooms in Teams Meetings?

1. Start by creating meetings in advance

Create Teams Meetings in advance. Set all meetings settings and agendas.

2. Create an information source that everyone can access

For example, use the book OneNote which is created in a place that you can share with all participants. Include room information in OneNote pages. The format is of course in your preferences, but overall it should be easy to find out what all the URLs of the event are.

Enter information on these pages.

What sessions are you going to have.

Separate breakout rooms with agenda topics and meeting are included in URLs.

Include time.

The main objective is that people can easily find out what the URLs of different rooms are. Keynote and closing are usually the same "room" that is also used as a general support meeting during a breakout.

It is a good idea to create all this information in a meeting invitation or event page. Also include a link to the first meeting and a shared OneNote or information page.

3. Consider short links

If you are having an outdoor event (with guests) consider using short links. Changing the URL will make it very easy for you if needed (if you need to recreate a meeting), but these links are especially easy to use. If you do not have an easy way to create a short link or need very little, then you can definitely implement the meeting.

4. Handing over the room attendees

If you want to distribute attendance at least evenly across different rooms that you can use, for example, a OneNote page with a table (or shared Excel that is really well done this way) where attendees can write their names and then click on the meeting link to join that room.

If you don't need to know which room it is in, you can skip the recording names and instruct people to just click on the link to the room they like.

It is good to have a title page, with all URLs in one place. This will make it easier to copy-paste the information that is given in the teams meeting chat.

5. Facilitating the event

As the narrator you need to be active in the meeting so that people know how the event is structured. People know how to attend the first meeting and in that meeting you need to explain to them what is expected of them and how they will join the breakout room, what is the schedule and where / when they come back.

It helps to prepare the messages you have shared for chat: schedule, links to (small) different rooms and what are the topics of those rooms. And when they return to the main room.

Create a meeting invitation. Event start meetings can be "as teams meetings", so that people can easily join the meeting. However, you create a closing meeting separately, so you don't accidentally have a new room. It is good to create breakout rooms and other invitations separately in your calendar and then create invitations with the exception of meeting at the event without joining a teams meeting.

Instruct people not to end the event meeting. Instead they should join the breakout room and the teams will put the event meeting to hold on their own. When they finish the breakout meeting they return to the main event meeting.

Go ahead and activate the chat for all those meetings. Instruct people to contact them during the conversation if they have a problem.

When starting the breakout part, go to different rooms so that you can help those who have problems. And as an active initiator you may want to tour during breakouts as well.

Meeting organizers (who created those meetings) can use the "end meeting" functionality when a breakout occurs.

Actively use chat during the event to let people know over and over again (yes, you need to do this sometime to get attention - especially with a large audience) and "What's Next In the URL of which room "share".

Tell people that Event Main Event Chat is used for support so that they can re-add it if there is a problem.

While the above may seem a bit complicated, it is not. It is about preparing to keep attendees up to date on what is going on. However, for those in a hurry, you can do this in a very simple way.

Make room to get a Url

Create a message that you will paste into Teams with instructions (schedule, room URL and topics) and tell them about the event during the start of the event. If you have time you create fewer messages because they sound much better in teams messages (or use the link with the label again). 

Keep on pasting the information to room chats.

Join in those rooms in advance

You can join 4 Teams meetings at the same time (3 of those will be on hold) which allows you to quickly switch between 4 rooms. If you have more than 4 rooms -> have people to assist you with this.

End meetings when breakout rooms are out of sessions to let people know.

What about using teams and channels for the event?

You can create breakout rooms to teams quite easily with private channels and using Channel meetings (Meet now). Then you could have this kind of structure.

In the example, the team serves as the general-channel scheduled meeting rooms  and the channel also provides the chat part. Then you have separate breakout rooms that can be either standard channels (everyone can join) or private channels (private channel owners invite people). It is good to note that private channel meetings cannot be scheduled nor recorded.

Its rules for using teams and channels are:

1. Content sharing is easy - all team members have access to the content, even if they are guests.

2. You do not need to share the meeting URL - people can connect directly through the channel.

3. Chat is always available for everyone - of course if you plan this event with outsiders who are not already in your tenant: then you need to plan how to add them as guests in your environment and then in your team.

This may have some problems depending on the organization of the guests or if they do not already have Teams to use. So using a team and channels for events is not a silver bullet. However, for situations where attendees are already in the tenant, this can make this structure easier. And you don't need to create a new team: you can use the existing team and add the necessary channels for it.

This allows frequent breakout rooms to be used thus it would be easier to set up a meeting and join a breakout room.