(upbeat music)
- Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.
Wherever in the world you may be,
thank you for joining us today at Ignite 2020.
This is mastering virtual breakout rooms
in Microsoft Teams.
I am James Skay, Senior Product Marketing Manager
for Microsoft Teams meetings.
And with me, I have.
- Hi, I'm Nakul.
I'm Product Manager with Microsoft Teams team.
- Today's session is dedicated
to virtual breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams.
We'll first start off with an overview
of the breakout rooms, their use cases and features,
and then jump into a demo that showcases the experience
from both the organizer and participant views.
We'll close with a quick preview
into some of the upcoming features coming
to breakout rooms later this calendar year.
Let's dive in with our breakout room overview.
Now, before we get too far, let me provide a response
to a question that many
of you are probably asking yourselves right now.
When will breakout rooms be coming to Teams?
Virtual breakout rooms will be available in Teams
for our education, commercial,
and GCC customers in early Q4.
You can track the latest status of all
of our feature developments on the Microsoft 365 roadmap
at aka.ms/m365roadmap.
So what are virtual breakout rooms?
Let's take a look at an example.
Here, we are in a Teams meeting
with nine individuals plus the organizer,
breakout rooms allow you to divide the meeting
into subgroups to facilitate conversations,
ideation, learning, et cetera.
Participants are then moved into a virtual breakout room,
a smaller room different than the main meeting,
where they can complete their objectives.
Once completed, the organizer is able
to pull the attendees back into the main meeting
to report back.
All of the artifacts that were created
in the breakout room are then made available
in the main meeting.
Since breakout rooms are in Teams meetings,
all of the innovation
that makes Teams meetings great come through.
This is also true of our security features
that help make your Team's meetings a safe
and secure place to meet.
Let's explore a few Teams meetings features
that we think you'll find beneficial in breakout rooms.
Let's start with Together mode.
An inclusive meeting experience
that brings everyone together in a shared virtual setting.
For those that may not be aware,
Together mode is a new meeting experience in Teams
that uses AI segmentation technology
to digitally place participants at a shared background,
making it feel like you're sitting in the same room
with everyone else in the meeting.
Together mode makes meetings more engaging
by helping you focus on other people's faces
and body language, making it easier to pick up
on nonverbal cues that are so important
to human interaction.
This can be especially helpful
in facilitating smaller group discussions in breakout rooms.
Interactive experiences like collaborating
on a whiteboard are also beneficial in breakout rooms.
Available in every Team's meeting, participants,
even those on mobile devices can collaborate in real time
with digital ink on the Microsoft Whiteboard.
Whiteboards created in the breakout rooms are stored
and available for use after the meeting,
including sharing back in the main meeting.
And last, but certainly not least,
an upcoming intelligent feature coming to Teams meetings
and breakout rooms is live transcription.
Building upon our live captions feature today,
we are excited to deliver live transcriptions,
a feature that can capture and record what was said
in a breakout room, including who said what.
And just like whiteboards, the transcript is saved
as part of the breakout room chat
and can be referenced after the meeting.
For more information on these innovative features
and more coming to meetings,
be sure to check out our other sessions here at Ignite.
When might you choose to use virtual breakout rooms?
Breakout rooms are a fantastic tool
to help facilitate small group discussions,
brainstorming sessions, and even learning
and development opportunities.
And breakout rooms aren't just for educational institutions.
From small corporations to large enterprises,
every organization likely has a need
and many use cases for them.
Now, I'm gonna turn it over to Nakul
to talk about the individual features within breakout rooms.
- Great, so, yeah, so let's talk about some key features
that are able available to organizer.
So when organizer is creating breakout rooms,
organizer will have options to go
and split them into rooms automatically or manually.
Once the rooms are created after that, as well,
organizer can go and switch participants
from one room to another.
Once the rooms are started, organizer will have options
to jump between one room to another,
go answer any questions, come back
or go to another meeting room from there.
Organizer will also have the option to go
and send announcements like, hey, this is the link
of the videos, of the files that we presented
in the main meeting, five minutes left, and stuff like that,
as well as organizer will have the option
to go and set timer for each room.
So I would say that 30 minutes is the duration
for all the rooms that I have started,
and at the end of 30th minute,
all the rooms will close automatically
and the participants will come back to the main meeting.
Beside this, organizer can also go
and rename the rooms, delete some rooms,
and also do some pre-meeting room configurations.
Okay, so let's look at the meeting participants features.
So when organizers start the room,
participants join the respective breakout rooms
that they've been assigned into.
Once they're in the room, they can go
and collaborate together by using whiteboard,
they can start recording, they can use notes,
and any other meeting artifacts that are available
in the main meeting as well.
Once the room has ended, they go back to the main meeting
and they will be able to go and present the content
that they had prepared in the breakout room session.
If they have any questions while they are in the room,
they can request the organizer to come
and join their through meeting.
And they will also have the option to go and chat
with the organizer in the same room meeting chat.
Before the room meeting is getting over,
they will receive notification saying,
hey, one minute or two minutes are left,
so that they have time to go and wrap up
and go back into their main meeting.
So these are some of the key features
that meeting participants will have.
- Thank you, Nakul.
Now that we've set the overview, let's see it in action.
I'm excited to have some of my colleagues available online
to help us demo breakout rooms.
Let's jump in.
Let's start off in our Microsoft Teams meeting.
For those of you familiar with Teams,
you may notice this view looks a bit different.
This is our new meeting experience.
This new view can be toggled for many of you today
in the General tab, under Team settings.
Here, we see a dynamic and engaging group of colleagues
who have joined their Team meeting and have been tasked
with dividing into smaller groups
for a brainstorming activity.
Now that everyone has their assignment,
let's jump in and create our rooms.
You'll notice a new icon on the top
of our meeting control bar, breakout rooms.
As you may have guessed,
this is where we configure breakout rooms
in a Teams meeting.
We started out by defining the number
of breakup rooms needed and how we want
to separate our group.
Teams can automatically assign attendees into rooms,
or we can choose to manually assign them ourselves.
Let's create two rooms
and have the participants automatically assigned.
Here, we can see that what will be created,
two rooms each with five people.
With Teams, you can create
up to 50 breakout rooms per meeting.
Now, just as we requested, we have two breakout rooms
with each given a default name.
We can choose to keep the name or rename it to our liking.
To rename, simply simply click on the ellipses
next to the room and choose rename.
Give it a title, like blue room for this one.
Then we'll name the other one, green,
rename green room.
There we go.
Blue and green.
Now, let's look at,
see how Teams has distributed our attendees
amongst the rooms.
As we expand each room,
we can see the assigned participants.
If we need to make any changes, we can do it here.
Now let's swap Nakul in the green room
and move him to the blue room and bring Amy
from the blue room and move her into the green room.
There, that looks good.
Now, in the event that you created too many rooms,
or you wish to add more, you can add and delete rooms here,
as you wish by choosing the ellipses
and removing the room or clicking to add.
Before we open the rooms, let's first take a look
at the main breakout room settings.
By default, Teams automatically
sends meeting participants notification that they're about
to be moved into their assigned breakout room.
This feature will be more useful
for our K-12 and education users,
and those that want to quickly get people into the rooms.
If you prefer to have your meeting attendees receive
and acknowledge a prompt before they're redirected
into a breakout room, just uncheck this box.
When ready to move everyone into their assigned rooms,
we click on start rooms.
Alternatively, you can just choose
to open the rooms individually
by clicking on the ellipses here.
It should be helpful if you need
to give each room an special instructions
as you break them out one by one.
Now, let's move everyone into their breakout rooms.
Now, remember, for those that are automatically sent
into breakout rooms, Teams gives them a timer
before moving them.
And for those that are manual, it'll be up to them
to acknowledge and accept the prompt
before they joined the room.
Here, we can see the status of the rooms and attendees
as they flow into their breakouts.
As the organizer of the main meeting, I can choose
to jump in between the rooms as needed.
Let's see what's going on in the blue room.
Hey, good morning, blue room.
How's the group discussion going so far?
I think you're all engaged
and you each have your videos turned on.
What a great use case for Together mode.
Let me turn it on.
Looking great.
Now, as I shared earlier, all of the great innovation
and experiences in Teams meetings are naturally available
in breakout rooms, large gallery, Together mode,
live captions, even soon
to be released live transcription speaker attribution.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point.
Now, let's go check it on the other room.
Keep up the great work team.
Hello, green room.
It looks like you all are off to a great start
on your SWOT analysis with the Microsoft Whiteboard.
Good job on the assignment.
Looking forward to have you share out your analysis
to the broader team.
Message me in the group chat if you need anything
and I'll jump back over.
That was the organizer, I'm automatically a participant
each of the breakout rooms and can easily follow along
with any meeting chats that are in progress.
And should anybody need my assistance,
they can either mention me in the group chat
to get my attention or choose to nudge me
to join their meeting.
Great to see that the green room is making progress.
Let's provide a five minute warning to the breakout rooms
by sending an announcement.
Now that I'm back in the main meeting, I can choose
to go into the breakout room panel and click on the ellipses
and make that announcement.
Let's give them five minutes,
then we'll ask them to come back.
Here, we can see that announcement was broadcast
by the medium chat to all the rooms.
Okay, time is up.
Let's bring everyone back.
Now, as I close the rooms, everyone's brought back
into the main meeting.
In addition, and as I mentioned before,
all the files, chats and whiteboards that were created
or shared in the breakout rooms remain
and can be referenced even after the rooms are closed.
This is especially helpful to the organizer
who may want to share out whiteboards,
PowerPoint presentations, and other files
that may have been created in the breakout rooms
with the rest of the group.
In addition, I can choose to reopen the rooms
for another exercise, automatically moving everybody back
to their breakout room.
Now that we've experiences from the perspective
of the meeting organizer, let's see what this looks like
as a meeting attendee.
I'm now back into our original meeting
with all of my colleagues.
When the organizer has started the breakout rooms,
you can see that we receive a countdown timer
before automatically being brought into the assigned room.
One other thing to call out,
only the main meeting organizer can add additional people
to the breakout rooms.
You'll notice that I am unable to look
at the meeting details for the join coordinates.
This is to prevent attendees from inviting others
that shouldn't be in the meeting.
To enable collaboration of breakout rooms,
everyone in the breakout becomes a presenter by default,
whether they wanna share their screen,
a whiteboard, a PowerPoint presentation,
no initial permissions are needed.
Here, we see the announcement
that was just made from the organizer,
letting us know that we have five minutes remaining.
Let's send the organizer a quick note that we're done early.
Send the message.
And with that, our time is up.
You can see that Teams is closing the room
as well as the breakout meeting chat.
Now, in addition, Teams is notifying us
before moving us back into the main meeting.
Speaking of time, let's get back to our presentation
and talk about features coming
to breakout rooms in the near future.
Now, as we mentioned earlier,
virtual breakout rooms will be available in Teams
for our education, commercial,
and GCC customers in early Q4.
The next few slides are meant to give you a preview
of additional breakout room features
and capabilities coming later this calendar year.
I'm gonna turn it back over to Nakul
to walk you through some of these features.
- Sure, so, as we saw in the demo, organizer can go
and create breakout room session
during the meeting as of now.
In future, we will also extend the capability
to go and create breakout rooms, assign participants
before the meeting has even started.
And once the meeting has started,
this view will be a single view
that organizer can go and see,
like there are like 11 rooms created.
They will be link to go
and copy the individual room meeting invite
and send it to the external speakers who would love
to come and present in the rooms meeting.
Organizer can also go and join the individual rooms meetings
from this view and can go in and reassign,
and in fact, get the link of the artifacts also.
Now, this is the organizer view.
If you are the participant, you would go and see the rooms
that you have been assigned into.
Like, for this instance, I'm assigned to room number one,
and I can see that this is the room
which I am assigned into,
and I can also go and join the meeting directly
from clicking the join button from this view.
if I'm assigned to multiple rooms while,
like, let's suppose in the room one in the first session
and room number two in the second session,
then I will be able to go and see the links
to both the rooms that I'm assigning to.
So, beside the pre-meeting creation and assignment,
we will also go and support presenting the artifacts
directly from the share tray inside the main meeting.
So, if I'm assigned to room number one or room number two,
I will see that the artifacts that I have created
for that room inside the main meeting.
I can just go and click on sharing,
click on the breakout rooms, and that will open
and show me the whiteboard
or the PowerPoint file that I had created,
and single click will go and present that.
Organizer will also have the option
to go and assign participants to room with the help of tags.
So right now, organizer has to go
and individually assign participants to room,
but in future, we will also go and support tagging.
So you can just say, I have all the students from class 4A,
they will go to room number one.
So, this will directly assign all the students
from class 4A into the rooms.
We will also go and support multiple presenters creating
and assigning participants to room.
So what that means is that I can go and choose
which specific presenter in the meeting will help me
with the breakout room session.
Now, two people can go and create rooms,
assign participants and manage.
So these are some of the new features
that we have in our roadmap,
and we'll be bringing in the next versions.
- Thank you, Nakul.
For the latest status on these features and more,
visit the Microsoft 365 roadmap at aka.ms/m365roadmap.
Here's a list of suggested related sessions
for Microsoft Teams meetings, calling, and devices.
For an entire list
of Microsoft Teams sessions available here at Ignite,
visit aka.ms/teamssessions.
From all of us here at Microsoft and Microsoft Teams,
thank you for joining, goodbye.
- Thank you. Goodbye.