MSTeams Breakout Room

Only meeting organizers on the desktop versions of Teams (Windows and Mac) can create and manage Breakout Rooms.

Creating a Breakout Room

Start the Meeting

In the meeting controls, select the 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) and select Create Rooms.

Assigning people manually to Breakout Rooms

Select Assign participants

Choose the participants who will be sharing the Breakout Rooms by selecting the check box next to their names

Select Assign and select the room for the participants, repeat the step to assign the remaining participants to their required rooms

You can rename the Breakout Room to make it easier to identify each room.

Find the room, click on the three dots (more options), and the Rename the room.

Start using Breakout Rooms

After you have assigned the participants to the designated rooms, you can start all rooms.

To open all rooms at the same time, click on Start rooms

To start each room manually, click on more options (three dots) and Open room, Participants will get a 10 second count down before they enter the room.

Organiser can join the Breakout rooms

Next to the Breakout room, select more options (three dots) select Join room

To leave room, select Return within the Breakout room

You can also close Breakout rooms, select more options and click on Close room, participants will see a 10 second count down before they re join the main meeting.

Allow Participants to re-join the meeting

By default, this setting is off. Turning it on gives participants the option to leave their Breakout rooms and return to the original meeting to re-join the larger discussion.

Select more options, by the Breakout Room pane and select room settings

Switch the toggle next to the participants can return to the main meeting, otherwise the organiser will have to move the participants manually back to the main meeting