Breakout Rooms will soon support the option to set time limits.

What you need to know

• Microsoft appears to be testing an option to set time limits for Breakout Rooms.
• An image of the feature in action was recently shared online.
• There is also an item on the Microsoft 365 roadmap for the feature.

Microsoft Teams will soon support the option to set time limits for Breakout Rooms. The feature was noticed by Aggiornamenti Lumia and shared on Twitter earlier today.

Breakout Rooms within Teams are a useful feature to split into groups. You can speak to anyone within a main meeting and then split into subgroups to discuss things. It’s a fun feature for classrooms and professional environments, as you can pause to breakout rooms and work in small groups before regrouping to share insights and ideas.

However, one problem with Breakout Rooms is that you need to tune a time when they finish or manually call people back to the main meeting. With the possibility of time limits, it would be easy to ask people to pause for a certain time, for example five minutes, before everyone would walk back to the main meeting.

Setting time limits should also make it easier to follow a schedule. If you need to manually retrieve people or ask people to come back at a certain time, it’s easy to make breakout rooms last longer than planned.

Set a time limit is coming to Microsoft Teams pic.twitter.com/iewoLwhXay

— Aggiornamenti Lumia (@ALumia_Italia) March 31, 2021

I make an informed guess that the image is specific to Breakout Rooms. Aggiornamenti Lumia only mentions that there will be a time limit for Teams, but the user interface and options are the same as when you set up Breakout Rooms, as shown below.

Source: windowscentral