Frequently Asked Question

What are Breakout Rooms?

Breakout Rooms are a new feature in Microsoft Teams and allow meeting participants to be split off into subgroups for smaller discussions and then brought back together within the same meeting.

Breakout Rooms can be created by the meeting organiser – that is, the user who created the meeting invite. At the time of writing, it is not possible to change the meeting organiser after a meeting invitation has been sent.

Get Started with Breakout Rooms

Schedule your Teams meeting in the usual way, either from the Outlook or Teams calendar.

Once your meeting has started, as the meeting organiser you can use the Breakout Rooms icon to create a series of virtual rooms, into which your participants will be divided into once you start the rooms during the meeting.

As a meeting organiser, you will not participate in the rooms once they start.

Create Breakout Rooms

When you first select the Breakout Rooms icon, you will be prompted to choose the number of rooms you wish to create.

Up to 50 rooms can be created per meeting. You may add more rooms during the meeting later if needed.

You may also select whether you would like to have Teams automatically assign meeting participants into the rooms (default) or if you would like to manually specify members of each room later from the sidebar.

When using Automatic Assignment of participants into rooms, ensure your participants have all joined the meeting before creating your Breakout Rooms. You must manually assign any participants who join the meeting after the rooms have been created.

Once you have created your rooms, you can view their status in the Breakout Rooms sidebar, visible whenever you select the Breakout Rooms icon.

From the sidebar, you can adjust the rooms; add and remove rooms, assign participants and move members who leave a room back into their room.

Use the Close Rooms button to close all rooms at once and return every participant back to the main meeting.

Starting a room splits the assigned participants into that room.

Closing a room brings those participants back into the main meeting.

Agree a time limit with your participants before you start the rooms so they know how long they’ll have to chat in their groups.

You may wish to set up your rooms at the top of your meeting so that you can quickly start the rooms when they are needed.

Further Information

Please review Microsoft Documentation on this topic for more information:

Summary:

Using breakout rooms in Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

In-depth Instructions:

Use breakout rooms in Teams meetings - Office Support (microsoft.com)