[Music]
Hello, it's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
After many delays, virtual breakout rooms for Teams meetings are finally here.
Now we can create virtual rooms in our meetings
and split our participants into groups and assign them to different rooms.
You might want to do this if you have a large group that you want to break up into smaller more focused groups
so they can work on different things at the same time.
If you don't have breakout rooms already,
they'll be coming to your Teams app very soon.
They're part of the new experience so if you haven't switched that on yet,
watch my video on how to do that now.
In this video I'm going to walk you through virtual breakout rooms and how to use them.
I'm going to use a whiteboard to show you how this works.
So you, as the organiser, start out with a normal Teams meeting.
You schedule the meeting and invite your participants
and you can join the meeting in the normal way to get it started.
In this demo I'm going to call the meeting the "main room"
and I'm Matt, the organiser, and I invite four attendees: Pradeep, Megan, Alex and Patty.
Once we're all in the meeting I can use the breakout rooms feature to create new rooms.
I'll create room one and room two
then I can assign my participants to each of the rooms.
Then I open the rooms and the participants are automatically moved
from the main room and into their assigned breakout room.
As the organiser, Matt can move between the different breakout rooms and the main room
and I can also send announcements to all the breakout rooms at the same time.
And I can bring everyone back to the main room when the breakout room sessions are finished.
So the first thing to do is schedule the meeting
and I just do that from the calendar app
and I choose "new meeting" - and by the way this can also be done using "meet now" meetings as well -
I just fill out all the details and invite my participants
and then send the invitation.
I can start the meeting and then I wait until everybody's joined.
Now if the breakout room feature is available you'll see this icon in the meeting toolbar.
Only the meeting organiser sees this button.
When you press that button for the first time, you'll see the "create breakout rooms" window.
First thing it asks you is to choose how many rooms you'll need
so I'll choose two but you can have up to 50.
You choose how you'd like to assign the participants to the rooms.
You can ask Teams to assign the people automatically.
Choosing automatically here will really save you time if you don't mind which rooms people are added to
but in my scenario I want to control who goes where
so I'll choose manually and then I'll create rooms.
When the rooms have been created, you'll see them listed in a panel every time you press the breakout rooms button.
I have room one and two and both rooms are empty and they're marked as closed.
If I need to I could add another room at this point.
I just choose the "add room" button here,
and if I go to the ellipsis I can also rename and delete any existing room.
The next step is to assign my meeting participants to the rooms.
To do that I expand the heading at the top here called "assign participants".
First I'll select the participants I want to move to room one.
I choose Patty and Pradeep.
Then I press "assign" and I choose room one.
Then I do the same for Alex and Megan in room two.
When I do this all my participants are still in the main room,
they only leave and join the breakout rooms when I press "start rooms".
So I'll press "start rooms" and the two rooms will now switch to "opening",
and all the participants that have been assigned to a room will move to them now.
So they'll see a message telling them that the breakout session has started
and that they'll be moved to the room in 10 seconds,
and you should finally see the room status as "open" with a little green icon.
You'll be left in the main room either on your own
or with anyone who wasn't assigned a room.
Now the participants in the breakout rooms can hold their own meetings,
they can talk, chat, share and discuss whatever they like and even record the meeting.
The organiser can make an announcement
which will show up in the chat section of every room.
This is really handy, say if you want to let everyone know that the breakout session is coming to an end,
or remind them of what their objective is.
To make an announcement, just go up to the ellipsis at the top of the breakout room panel,
and choose "make an announcement".
I'm going to announce that the breakout session will finish in 10 minutes.
Your announcements will appear in the chat window on all the breakout rooms
and they will be marked as important in red so it's really obvious to the members of the meeting.
The organiser can also move between breakout rooms to facilitate or just see how things are going.
To do that, choose the ellipsis to the right of the room name and then choose "join room".
I'll join Patty and Pradeep in room 1.
A new window will open for the room 1 meeting
and the existing main room meeting will be put on hold for me while I'm in room 1.
I can only be active in one meeting at a time
but other attendees could go back to the main room even if i'm not there
- it's only on hold for me .
When the breakout session is over, you can move everyone back to the main room by choosing "close rooms".
This will mark each room as closed again
and move all the participants back into the main room.
Then you can wrap up the meeting or even open the rooms again if you want to start another breakout session.
When the meeting is finished you'll see an entry in your chat list
for every room that was included in the breakout session.
So if I go to chat here I can see the cards for room one and two
and anything that was created and shared or recorded in that meeting
will be here for me and all the attendees.
So that's your first look at virtual breakout rooms in Teams meetings.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
[Music]