What this article covers
This article covers information about using the Breakout Rooms feature in a Teams meeting.
Creating breakout rooms in a large Teams meeting will allow you to separate participants into smaller groups. In this article, the following is covered:
- Create breakout rooms
- Assign people to breakout rooms manually
- Rename the breakout rooms
- Start using the breakout rooms
- Send an announcement to all breakout rooms
- Chat in breakout rooms
- Close breakout rooms
IMPORTANT NOTES
- Breakout rooms are only available in meetings created in a Teams Channel
- Only the meeting organizer (on the desktop version of Teams) can create and manage breakout rooms
- Breakout rooms are created after the meeting starts
Create breakout rooms
- Start the meeting in a Team Channel.
- In the meeting controls, select Breakout rooms.
- Select the number of rooms you want (50 max), and whether you want Teams to assign people to rooms (Automatically) or you want to choose the people for each room yourself (Manually).
Note:This is the only time you can choose to have people automatically assigned to breakout rooms. You won't be able to change this option later in the meeting.
4. Select Create Rooms.
Assign people to breakout rooms manually
If you chose Automatically in the previous procedure, participants will be assigned to breakout rooms as soon as you open the rooms. If you chose Manually, follow the steps below.
- Select Assign participants.
2. Choose the people who will share a breakout room by selecting the check boxes next to their names.
3. Click Assign, then select a room for those people.
4. Repeat Steps 2-3 until everyone has been assigned to a room.
Rename the breakout rooms
Once the rooms are created and populated, you can rename each room to reflect the group of people it contains, what they’ll be working on, or something else.
1. Point to the room, select More options, then Rename room.
2. Enter the new name and select Rename room.
Start using the breakout rooms
By default, meeting participants are moved to their assigned rooms as soon as you open the room; as the meeting organizer, you can join and leave any room as you wish.
Send an announcement to all breakout rooms
You may want to send announcements to give time updates, for example, or share discussion prompts.
1. Select More options at the top of the Breakout rooms pane, then select Make an announcement.
2. Enter your announcement and click Send. Participants will receive a notification in their meeting chat to check for your announcement.
Chat in breakout rooms
Each breakout room has its own chat, and all of the chats are available in your main Teams Chat list.
Here you can chat with the members of any breakout room. Once you’ve joined a breakout room, you can also select Chat in the room to chat with the people there.
Note: When the breakout room closes, the room chat ends and cannot be continued; you'll still be able to view the chat history and any shared files.
Close breakout rooms
When you close the breakout rooms, the participants return to the main meeting.
- Select Close rooms; you'll know rooms have successfully closed when their status changes to Closed.
Notes: Breakout rooms remain open until the organizer manually closes them. If the rooms are reopened later in the meeting, participants keep the same room assignments they had previously.