Microsoft Teams will soon let participants move between breakout rooms, just like on Zoom

Microsoft Teams is finally bringing a hot-wanted feature that everybody wants: letting participants move between breakout rooms. This exact capability has not yet been available, except if you’re the meeting’s moderator.

The Redmond tech giant says in an update of its roadmap site, under Feature ID: 121269, that Teams will allow meeting organizers to show all breakout rooms to participants, letting them freely choose and switch rooms for easier coordination during meetings.

“Enabling this setting in breakout rooms allows participants to move freely from one room to another, simplifying breakout room coordination for meeting organizers and participants,” the update reads.

From Microsoft’s description, it seems like the rollout of this feature will start sometime in August 2024 for all platforms worldwide, including Mac and Windows desktops and iOS and Android mobiles.

Breakout rooms on Teams are “sub-meeting” spaces that allow meeting moderators to group the participants and discuss. If you’re familiar with the hybrid workforce or online schooling, breakout rooms may not sound so strange to you.

But so far, only moderators are able to jump from one breakout room to another. So, it is indeed a hot-wanted feature that’s been requested for so long, leaving us wondering as to what took Microsoft this long to launch it.

After a little digging, we found a few questions on Microsoft’s Community page asking for this feature. One user, asking for this functionality, indicated that Zoom might be superior in this aspect and found manual assignments and unexpected disconnections in Teams meetings frustrating.

Another one, dated back in 2022, expressed frustration about the lack of ability of participants in Teams meetings to choose their own breakout rooms. The most recent one is dated back to January 2024.