Microsoft Teams will soon let you set time limits for breakout rooms

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

Breakout rooms within Teams are a handy feature for splitting off into groups. You can speak to everyone within a main meeting and then split off into subgroups to discuss things. It’s a nice feature for classrooms and professional settings, as you can break off to brainstorm and work within small groups before regrouping to share insights and ideas.

An issue with breakout rooms, however, is that you have to coordinate a time for when they’ll wrap up or manually call people back into the main meeting. Having the option for time limits would make it easy to ask people to break off for a set time, such as five minutes, before having everyone bumped back into the main meeting.

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

I’m making an educated guess that the image is specifically for breakout rooms. Aggiornamenti Lumia only mentions that a time limit is coming to Teams, but the user interface and options are the same as when you set up breakout rooms, as shown below.

Source: Windows Central
The Microsoft 365 roadmap has an entry for breakout room timers, which is likely what’s shown off in the image.