What Can Microsoft Teams Do

Note: this article was recently updated to reflect the delayed delivery date of breakout rooms. Availability was moved from October 2020 to November 2020 and again to December 2020. Rollout will begin early December and finish by mid-December. Edited 11 November.

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One of the most anticipated features in Microsoft Teams is finally here: breakout rooms. Breakout rooms are a way to separate the participants in a meeting into mini meetings, either randomly or by organizing them yourself. They’re especially useful in online classes, corporate events, board meetings with committee breakouts, and organization retreats with brainstorming breakouts. For a video overview of this post (which might be more helpful because it includes a lot of demos), click play below.

Breakout rooms are one of the highest-voted feature requests for Microsoft Teams as seen in the below UserVoice request.

Incidentally, if you’re not familiar with UserVoice and you want to make feature requests known, make sure to vote for the ones you think are important at microsoftteams.uservoice.com. Microsoft pays close attention to this site when determining which features to prioritize; I can attest from personal experience working with them, actually.

Breakout rooms turn out to be reasonably simple to set up and manage, so let’s cover some of the bigger features built into them, and especially what they can’t do yet. Fair warning that most of what you see is in preview at the time of posting. Something I say or show here may not look or act the same when you’re watching, but likely the big picture concept remains.So if you’re not seeing the right button in the right place, look around a little. You’ll probably find it.

I'm a trainer and I've been asked by various organisations to deliver training over Teams. I'd like to practice (which means having more that one person on the call!). I usually do this on other services by logging on multiple times from different devices, and experimenting with the features. Keeping track of how people can access information and who can do what within Microsoft Teams is a great place to start. So, let’s do this! Here’s a dissection of all the permissions and rights capabilities available with Microsoft Teams. Members and Owners of the Team and Group. Owners of a Microsoft Team have.

Another big-picture comment: breakout rooms are currently in private preview. Microsoft recently updated the roadmap item to indicate that breakout rooms will be available in November, pushed from the original delivery timeframe of October.

And, while I was under the impression that if the organizer of the meeting has breakout rooms, even external people in the meeting can take part in them, after testing, I’ve run into an issue where external participants cannot be assigned to breakout rooms. I’m told it’s supposed to support external people once it’s available to everyone; for the time being your mileage may vary.

To create your rooms, for now you’ll have to be using theTeams desktop app—not mobile or web app—and you have to be the meeting organizer. Only the meeting organizer can create breakout rooms. That means literally only one person in the meeting is able to do this and must be present throughout the time you want to use breakout rooms for them to be used in a meeting.

Click the breakout rooms button in the meeting toolbar. Note that the breakout rooms icon might be either of the two shown below. The one on the right is the one I think they’re going with as a final version. Also, I’ve even seen examples where it’s housed in the ellipses menu. Microsoft is still finalizing how it’ll look and where it’ll live apparently.

Teams is an amazing tool for collaborating on your work, but by default you can only invite internal users to a team. In a lot of situations, you’re going to need to work with others outside your organization. In order to invite an external guest, you’ll need to change an admin setting first. Microsoft Teams works much better when users are aware of all the useful things it can do. This collaboration app, part of Office 365, has a lot of organization and data-sharing options just below. Apr 06, 2021 With guest access, you can provide access to teams, documents in channels, resources, chats, and applications to people outside your organization, while maintaining control over your corporate data. See Set up secure collaboration with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

Choose how many rooms you’d like—up to 50—and decide whether you’d like to have attendees randomly and evenly distributed among the breakout rooms or if you’d like to organize the rooms manually.

Once created, the rooms should all say Closed next to them; they’re not available to join yet and won’t be until you open them.

Right now, breakout rooms can only be created in standard scheduled meetings and can’t use them in channel meetings—though I think that’s only a limitation during the private preview. You can only organize participants into the breakout rooms once the meeting has started. Also for now, only the meeting organizer can create and open breakout rooms in a meeting. Presenters and attendees are unable to do that. That means if you organize the meeting you must be present for the meeting to make use of the breakout rooms.

By default, your breakout rooms will be named Room 1, Room2, etc. You can rename these by clicking the ellipses menu to the right of the room name to rename it. Renaming isn’t critical, but it can add an element of fun if not general organization to your process. For example, if you’re holding a model UN event, it wouldn’t make much sense for Denmark and Bolivia and Australia to meet in Rooms 1, 2, and 3, right? Hell, you can use emoji to label the rooms if you want. 🇩🇰 🇧🇴 🇦🇺

After you’ve created your breakout rooms, you can add more, one at a time if you’d like. Click Add room in the breakout room pane.

After you’ve created your breakout rooms, you can delete them one at a time if necessary. Click the ellipses menu next to each room to delete them. If participants have already been split up, the participants will be dropped in the main room, waiting for reassignment.

When you open your breakout rooms, there are two ways participants join: they are either given the choice to join or they are forcefully sent to their breakout room. For corporate environments, being able to choose might make sense, but for classroom situations, you almost certainly want to make sure your students are automatically sent to the breakout room.

To toggle this option, click the ellipses in the breakout room pane, click Settings, and check or uncheck Automatically move people into opened rooms as appropriate to your situation.

If you’ve checked the box, attendees will see a countdown until they’re automatically joined into their breakout room. If you’ve unchecked the box, attendees will be presented with a pop-up asking if they want to join. You can see whether they join from the breakout room pane.

Once your breakout rooms are created and you’re ready to split up your meeting into your rooms, click the Start rooms button to start all the rooms at once. Or you can open them one-by-one by clicking the room’s ellipses and selecting Open room to set each up individually. This disperses your participants into their assigned room.

Once attendees join their breakout room, they have all the powers of a presenter in their breakout room. Notably, that means they can share their screen.

In the event you need to swap people out between rooms, you have the power to do that. To move participants between rooms, expand the room name in the breakout room pane, click the checkbox next to name and click the Assign button. Select the room you want to move them to. This is also how you assign attendees if you chose to set up your rooms manually.

The meeting organizer can broadcast an announcement message via meeting chat to all breakout rooms so everyone in all rooms are informed of updates, changes, or news during their breakout sessions.

To create an announcement, click the ellipses in the BreakoutRooms pane and select Make an announcement. In the pop-up box, write your announcement then press Send.

This message is an important-labeled message in the breakout room chat, so anyone in the breakout room can see it and respond to it, including @mentioning the organizer to get their attention if required.

That said, the organizer has access to the chat for each breakout room via the chat icon in the Teams app bar. They show up like meetings. So you don’t necessarily need to join a meeting to take part in conversation. And if you want to send room-specific “announcements”, just use the room chat for it.

The organizer cannot be in all breakout rooms at once; however, they can jump between breakout rooms as necessary. To enter a breakout room, click the room’s ellipses and selecting Join room.

There is no warning that you’re entering the room. If privacy or a general ‘right to know’ attitude exists in your organization, it makes sense to announce that you’ve joined so everyone knows that you’re there.Maybe a chat message warning your impending arrival makes sense as well.

The meeting organizer can begin recording by jumping between each room. To record the breakout room, you need to be in it. In the meeting toolbar, click the ellipses then click Record. There is no way currently to automatically set all breakout rooms to start recording automatically upon opening.

At present, I’m seeing conflicting reports on whether an attendee can record the breakout room. Upon testing, I as an attendee could not. Though Microsoft documentation says breakout room attendees should have presenter status, which includes recording. Worst-case scenario is the organizer needs to start recording when all breakout rooms open.

While breakout rooms are open, attendees can upload files to the room chat for sharing and collaborating. To share a file in a breakout room, open the breakout room chat from the Chat icon the app bar in the main Teams window (not the meeting window nor the breakout window). Find the chat for the breakout room. Below the chat text box, click the paperclip icon to upload a new file or share an existing file from OneDrive. Press send once you're ready. Everyone else in the breakout room (including the meeting organizer) will be able to access the file and edit it live at the same time as you.

If you're looking for the files later on, they'll centrally located in a tab above the chat called Files. Again, click the Chat icon in app bar in the main Teams window, find the chat for the breakout room, point your mouse to the top of the chat space, and click the Files tab. Any files shared by anyone in the breakout room will be available there during and after the breakout room (or meeting).

Attendees can join from Teams on desktop, mobile, or the web. At least, once breakout rooms is generally available, so likely near the end of October 2020. If it does work for you and you continue to see the word Preview in the breakout rooms pane, there’s no guarantee it’ll work tomorrow, so don’t make this something you depend on. Always have a backup plan until that Preview label is gone.

While in a breakout room, meeting attendees are supposed to be given the presenter meeting role, meaning they’re able to share their video, audio, screen, a whiteboard, and files and they can record the breakout room; note that the attendee role does not have most of these rights in the main meeting. Keep in mind what I said just before about recording. Your mileage may vary.

Attendees cannot add participants.
Attendees will not see suggestions of people who should join (organizers may).
Attendees cannot get meeting details or dial out(akin to not being able to add participants).
Attendees cannot rejoin the original meeting themselves.

Once you as the organizer decide it's time to end the breakout rooms, you can close them, pulling everyone back into the main meeting. To close your breakout rooms, click the Close rooms button to close all the rooms at once. Or you can close them one-by-one by clicking the room’s ellipses and selecting Close room to close out each individually. At this time, breakout room participants cannot return to the main meeting room on their own nor can they close their own breakout room.

Once you close your breakout rooms, you can actually re-open them if you want. They will have the same artifacts—shared files, whiteboards, things like that—as before so the attendees can work on existing content. Or you can delete the existing breakout rooms and create new ones for a fresh experience.

Like regular meetings, you can download an attendance list and transcript. The recording will become available afterwards via MicrosoftStream as well. Only breakout room attendees and the organizer will have access to these because they’re in the breakout room-specific meeting chat, at least until the new meeting recap feature rolls out. Which, if you hadn’t heard about that, is really cool. Check out my Ignite 2020 Recap for more really cool Teams features coming soon.

Breakout rooms can be used by any logged-in or anonymous participant using the Teams desktop or mobile app, at least once you’re out of preview mode. Participants using a dial-in number or certain meeting-room devices—don’t ask me which ones—cannot join breakout rooms yet. In those situations, use the main meeting room as a breakout room for those people.

This post covers version 1 of breakout rooms, which is rolling out in September and October 2020. After that, Microsoft is planning further features, none of which have expected due dates I’m aware of as of yet.

Most importantly I would think, organizers will be able to share the ability to create and manage breakout rooms with other presenters.

Organizers be able to create breakout rooms and organize participants ahead of a meeting in a new breakout rooms tab in the new central meeting experience. While the organizer will see all breakout rooms, an attendee will only see the breakout room they’re assigned to.

Organizers will be able to use Teams tags—thoseTeam-specific people groupings you can use to organize people independent of existing Team or channel membership—to assign them to breakout rooms, which could save a lot of time. As an example, if you have a classroom for PhysicsLab and channels for each lab topic, tags for Lab group 1, Lab group 2, etc.let you organize people in a way your Team and channel setup couldn’t. Those tags are what you’ll be able to use soon enough.

Presenters will be able to share files, whiteboards, and other artifacts from the breakout rooms in the main meeting.

And lastly, a few other items mentioned include the ability to create breakout room templates so you don’t have to recreate room setups each time you schedule a meeting, and breakout rooms in channel meetings and meet now meetings are forthcoming.

So that’s a brief overview of what you can do with with breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams meetings. One important takeaway tip for you:test this thing out before you use it. Grab a friend or colleague—or a few—and try it out before you use it live during a meeting or class. You don’t need a ton of people to test it. It’s like any other thing in life: without trying it first, you may be surprised how it does or doesn’t work when you actually need it.

So hopefully you found this useful. A friendly reminder—for like the tenth time—that the breakout rooms feature is still in preview as of the time of publishing! Things might be a bit different in your system. In fact, if you notice differences, I’d love if you could comment below with what you see so others can keep their eyes peeled and be prepared for impacts on them.

Thanks for reading and happy testing, playing, and making the most of breakout rooms in Teams!

Microsoft have been adding lots of new features and applications to Office 365, such as Planner,Shifts and Microsoft Teams.

Taking on the likes of Slack, Microsoft describe Teams as a ‘chat-based workspace in Office 365’ allowing teams (internal only at this stage) to work together within one window to enhance teamwork. It's important to note that Microsoft Teams will be replacing Skype for Business (which will be retired 31st July 2021).

If you need any support adopting Microsoft Teams, please see our Microsoft Teams Services. You can also download this Quick Start PDF guide to give end users all the basics.

Need Teams governance guidance? Watch our on-demand recording of 'Managing Microsoft Teams' to see how to administer and govern Microsoft Teams.

What does Teams do?

Within one window, users can call upon a variety of key Office 365 apps and tools to help them work more effectively, such as:

Calendars and meetings (Outlook)
Create, share, edit and find content (SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote)
Call and meet team members (Skype)
Chat and instant messaging (Skype)

Key benefits of Teams

One centralised hub
Office 365 integration
Customise Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
Enterprise security & compliance
Azure Active Directory integration
No extra cost to Office 365 users

Using Teams

Before getting started it’s important to understand how Teams fits into the larger Office 365 picture, as creating Teams has some wider implications. Every Team created will automatically create a matching Plan (find out more on this in our Guide to Planner here), SharePoint Team Site, Office 365 Group and shared OneNote. While this brings a number of great benefits, such as shared documents and centralised team information, it can cause some governance and admin headaches. Luckily, the admin side of Teams allows this to be managed as we'll cover below.

Overview

Once your organisation has access to Teams, you can: download the desktop application, access Teams through your browser or download the mobile app.

Teams and Channels

To start your teamwork collaboration, you need a team. Setting up Teams is easy and done in a few clicks, requiring a Team name and a description; this then allows team members to be added. As mentioned above, a new Team will create a matching Office 365 Group, OneNote, SharePoint site and Plan—so this does need to be done with some caution.

Each Team has subsections, which are called Channels, and a General Channel will automatically be created. You can have multiple Channels within a Team; for example, you could have a 'Marketing' Team and then Channels such as 'Social Media', 'Product Launch', 'Blogs' etc. Or a Company could be a Team and Channels can relate to departments - you can choose whatever suits your organisation's way of working. Whenever there is a new notification or activity, the Channel will become bold.

Channel Tabs

Each Channel all have their own tabs along the top. Conversation (group chat), Files (shared documents) and Notes (shared OneNote) are automatically created and you can then add your own tabs.

Conversation

Conversations are one of the key features of Teams, allowing each Team to have a centralised discussion that is saved and easily searchable. Conversations are the central component where all teamwork is recorded—from file sharing to video calls.

The use of @mentions allows you to tag participants or even whole teams to notify others. Users that look at Conversations will easily see where they have been mentioned through the red @ symbol to highlight areas of importance to them. On top of this, your desktop app will notify you through an alert. As well as tagging, users can 'like' content and share emoticons or GIFs.

Files

In your Teams window, you can perform a variety of tasks directly within that window or browser, so that you avoid flicking between different applications. These tasks include the ability to delete, download, move files, open, copy, edit or get a link to share with others – giving you all the key features you would get in the native apps.

You can also start a Group chat alongside the file, to allow team discussions while all working on the files - and this conversation will appear in your Conversation thread.

View team files, edit, upload and create

Notes

Notes takes you to the Team shared OneNote. Within Teams you can view and edit your OneNotes (directly within the Teams window) or you can click to edit in the OneNote app.

Edit within Teams

Edit in OneNote

Adding Tabs

As mentioned, as well as these three automatic tabs you can also add your own, which currently include Planner, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Power BI dashboards and more.

Microsoft products can easily be added now, but there are also many future integrations coming to Teams, such as Asana integration. With integration between systems being so vital to teamwork, we can expect to see many more partnerships and out-of-the-box integrations!

Asana Integration

Meetings: The Meetings tab pulls your meetings in from Outlook and also allows you schedule meetings within the Meetings tab that are sent to a Team. If you want to schedule other meetings with external users or individuals, you will still need to use Outlook, as the Teams Meeting tab is only to schedule a meeting with a Team. (Remember the aim is team collaboration, not calendar management).

Files: Within Files you can quickly find and view files across OneNote, OneDrive and within Teams (stored in their own SharePoint sites). There’s also a very helpful ‘Recent’ tab so you can quickly access the latest documents you were working on, as well as a shortcut to your Downloads.

Admin

Microsoft Teams is a great product already as it allows great flexibility and gives you many possibilities. However, as mentioned earlier, getting started with Teams can also bring some knock-on effects, which can cause admin headaches. Luckily, within the Office 365 Admin, you can control Teams settings within the Groups control panel. Within Admin settings, you can control who can create teams, what features are or are not allowed, such as video meetings, screen sharing or animated images or if extensions can be used. This gives the control required to allow governance in line with your organisation's policy and ensures you can keep control over the app. Find out more here.

End User Adoption Guides

To find out how you can use Microsoft Teams Live Events to easily stream live events such as webinars, product demos or corporate presentations to external and internal audiences, read our 'How to use Microsoft Teams Live Events' guide.

For organisations with employees working on shift patterns, Shifts in Microsoft Teams provides shift scheduling and management capabilities. Find out more with our 'How to use Shifts in Microsoft Teams' guide.

There are also some great end-user adoption guides available online from Microsoft.

To learn how to use the meetings and calls functionality of Teams, you can take a look at these Meeting and Calling How-Tos.

A Microsoft Teams End User Quick Start Guide is also available to download and share with users.

FAQs

Is Teams available now? Yes - Teams is generally available.

Which Office 365 Plans include Teams? Teams is available to Business Essentials, Business Premium, F1, E1, E3, E4 (retired) and E5 customers. It's also available for Education and Non-profit plans but not yet Government.

What is on the Teams roadmap? You can view the full Teams roadmap here.

What about Skype for Business? Teams will be replacing Skype for Business! Find out more here.

Does Teams work with those outside your organisation? Yes - this feature was added and can be turned on or off. Guest access is included with all Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Enterprise, and Office 365 Education subscriptions. No additional Office 365 license is necessary. Guest access is a tenant-level setting in Microsoft Teams and is turned off by default. Find out more here.

Conclusion

Microsoft Teams How To Use

Microsoft Teams is already a robust offering and is benefiting from lots of new features and integrations. Even better, since Microsoft’s new direction under Satya Nadella, feedback and reviews on products have been well received with Microsoft actively acting upon public feedback. Microsoft Teams has a simple feedback program and you can go and view most popular suggestions, as well as see which ones are planned based on the number of up-votes. These requests and other features can then be seen on the public Office 365 Roadmap. This really shows a commitment to making a product aimed at user needs, so we have a great feeling about Microsoft Teams. What's more, seeing as Teams will be replacing Skype for Business we are sure that it will become well used!

Media coverage and reception has also been very positive with many Slack comparisons. Within these comparisons, Microsoft Teams is often faring very well in terms of features, usability and offering—but what makes it even more appealing is the fact that is it included with Office 365. For Office 365 users, this means that those who are already using other paid teamwork software can remove the licence expense, and those that aren't can gain access to a useful new application that competitors might be using - at no extra cost.

Microsoft Teams For Dummies

Next steps

If you are using Office 365, then we recommend trying Teams and providing your feedback to help shape the product. You can download a Quick Start PDF guide to get users started here.

Microsoft Teams Quick Start Pdf

If you are not using Office 365, then you can sign up for an Office 365 E3 trial (which includes Teams).

What Can I Do In Microsoft Teams

You can also find out how we can help with our Microsoft Teams Services or Contact Us and we can give an Office 365 demo or answer any questions.

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