How to use Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Times

You can create a group of breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams platform meetings, as these rooms include a group of participants and are separated from the main meeting.

This update has been requested by many in Microsoft Teams, as it gives you more control over your meetings and participants.

The Microsoft Teams application allows you to create 50 separate rooms within a single meeting, and there is no maximum number of members for these rooms.

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What is Breakout Rooms:

These separate rooms offer the ability to divide a meeting into a series of smaller meetings, much like having a series of small rooms within a large workspace in your company.

These rooms have a variety of useful uses depending on the type of meeting you're having or the type of work you're using Microsoft Teams for.

If you are a teacher giving a lecture to a group of 100 students and want to divide them into small work teams to solve some tests or research, you can distribute these students in small rooms.

The rooms have any number of students working together. Instead of students having to speak through another platform or fill the main meeting room with noise.

You can also distribute your company's work teams in these small rooms and leave the main meeting for board members or small team managers.

Separate meeting rooms have the same features as general meeting rooms. The meeting director must distribute the members himself or let the members in.

Members can enter rooms if they wish, if the meeting moderator allows it. Such a feature is useful in holding large conferences or large discussion rooms, where members can go to a separate room to discuss what they want away from the main meeting.

Read also: The most important additions to Microsoft Teams to organize teams and improve productivity

Enable Breakout Rooms:

Only the meeting manager can create separate meeting rooms. Certain options must be enabled within Microsoft Teams before these rooms can be used.

You must also use the Microsoft Teams application on your computer only. Rooms can be created or entered through the mobile app so far.

You can activate this feature by following these steps:

You cannot transfer the permissions to manage the meeting or choose an additional manager for the meeting.

You cannot create rooms before the start of the meeting.

How to use Breakout Rooms:

After making sure that all conditions for breakout rooms are activated, start or schedule your new meeting via Meet Now.

When the meeting starts and the number of participants reaches more than 5, you will find a new button that appears in front of you as you can see in the picture, and it is located in the meeting control bar.

You can start making separate meeting rooms by pressing the button shown in the picture to show you a pop-up menu to control the rooms.

Microsoft Teams gives you two options here:

After you have finished distributing the participants, click on Create Rooms, and this will show you a new list in the right part of the screen.

You can manage separate rooms through this section. You can add participants to it or transfer participants between rooms through it.

You can make the rooms closed or open, the difference is to allow the participants to enter the rooms themselves or distribute them as you see as the meeting manager, from here you can also close all the rooms and return everyone to the main meeting.

When you have finished distributing the participants and creating the new rooms, click on Start Rooms to start all the rooms at one time, and you can start one room at a time by clicking on it and changing its status from Closed to Open.

You can send a private invitation to each participant in the room to enter it by clicking on the participant's name at the bottom of the room.

The feature of separate rooms in Microsoft Teams offers a new way to organize work and helps increase team productivity by directing dialogue and meeting in a better and more customized way, and it benefits large companies in particular, but you can use it as you wish.