So i noticed that pre meeting room creation has hit General Availability in October following Public Preview from a post here which was in September but lets go and have a look at the GA feature for Worldwide tenants please note GCC-High and DoD are set currently for December 2021.

Check out breakout rooms on M365 Roadmap

Whats is this ?

This feature now allows breakout rooms in Teams meetings to be created before the meeting. Yayy! Where before you had to start the meeting then create your rooms so this features is very useful for pre staging your rooms and assigning participants to their rooms before the meeting. Always good to plan ahead 🙂

Supported Clients

Windows 10 and MacOS Desktop clients currently. Doesnt seem to available in browsers yet as the breakout room tab was missing so desktop client only for the mo it seems.

Lets take a look

Lets create a meeting in Teams Client go to Calendar on the left rail and then click “New Meeting”

Enter a meeting title, add attendees and a time etc

Click Send

Now we have a meeting in our calendar lets go edit it

Select your meeting and click edit

Create Rooms in Meeting

On the top you will see a tab for Breakout Rooms

Select the number of rooms

Click Add rooms and by magic we have rooms 🙂

Edit a Room

Now i want to change the names so go edit

Click Edit to update the room name

Update the name and click save

Change Meeting Settings

To change the settings for a specific room click the three dots and select settings. This will allow you to have different settings for each breakout room as shown below.

Assign participants to the rooms

To assign participants to the rooms click assign participants which can be done automatically or manually.

For manually click manually and then

Click a participant then assign a room

and click assign that will update the room assignments.

Please note – If you have selected to manually assign participants then you will need to assign everyone to their rooms you can manual add some then automatically assign some. If you want to move back to automatically assign participants instead of manual you will need to assign all users and start again or remove the rooms and create new ones. Then the next time you go back to assign participants the automatically assign will display again. This time lets choose automatically.

When automatically assigned it evens out as best it can depending on total number of participants assigns everyone to a room.

To delete a room

Click the three dots and then click delete

Click delete

If there were any participants allocated to the room when it was deleted they will be removed and displayed by the assign participant button so these people will need assigning again

To add another room

Click the + button on the top right as highlighted below

This will add another room – in this case room 5.

If you want to recreate all the rooms and start again click the icon that looks like refresh

This take you back to the create dialog box

Delete Rooms

If i want to delete all rooms then click the bin icon and click remove

Breakout rooms settings

To change Breakout room settings click the settings cog

Here you can assign presenters to rooms, set a time limit, automatically move people to rooms and choose to let people people return to the main meeting

To save these settings click the cross top right, to check settings click the cog again to confirm they saved.

So have fun and breakout 🙂