The Breakout Rooms feature from Microsoft Teams changes the game.

Microsoft updated its flagship Teams product with new features every month, and over the weekend, microsoft teams’ marketing director teased some improvements designed specifically for the online classes.

At the end of July, Microsoft confirmed that it plans to develop Zoom-like Breakout Rooms feature for Teams. Last month, Microsoft officially teased the support of Breakout Rooms at the Ignite 2020 conference and now the company has posted another teaser of this long-awaited update.

Brainstorming Rooms is a feature designed specifically to help more than 150 million students and institutional leaders use Microsoft Teams. With brainstorming rooms, Microsoft says teachers or organizers can divide the classroom into small groups.

In the groups, participants or attendees can have their own private conversations, and later they can return to the larger meeting.

In addition to the Breakout Rooms feature, Microsoft is also introducing support for 7 × 7 grid layout where teachers can view up to 49 participants at the same time.

Brainstorming rooms are also designed to make it easier for students or participants to collaborate with each other while keeping their distance from other participants and teachers.

Organizers can also manage permissions for the groups. For example, they can turn off the ability to edit and delete messages in the group.

Once the feature is available on Windows 10 or macOS, meeting organizers will see the Breakout Rooms icon when they click the three-dot menu, as shown in the screenshot below.

This option directs all users to a private meeting window and allows organizers to create up to 50 rooms in a meeting. You can automatically let participants join the groups, or you can also manually add users to the space.

While the 7v7 grid layout will be rolled out to users later this year, Microsoft says Teams will receive support for the Breakout rooms on Windows 10, macOS and other desktop platforms in December.

For those who use Teams on Android and iOS, Microsoft is currently planning to release the feature in December 2020.

Source: windowslatest