Breakout rooms

Breakout rooms are a feature of the Microsoft Office Live Meeting Professional Edition. During a meeting, presenters can use breakout rooms to create separate meeting spaces. You can divide attendees among the rooms, either manually or automatically, and allow each group to meet separately. After the breakout sessions are over, you can bring everyone back to the main meeting*.

* Note: Breakout rooms are only available to you if you are registered to use Office Live Meeting Professional Edition. These menu items are not available if you are registered to use Office Live Meeting Standard Edition. To find out which edition of Office Live Meeting you are using please refer to your welcome email.

To set up breakout rooms

Note: Computer Audio & Audio conferencing is currently not available for breakout rooms.

Attendees can use the non-verbal communication tools to communicate with each other for example online chat, Q&A, white board, text screens and content sharing or have the option to set up separate audio calls for each breakout room.

Step 1: During the meeting, click the Attendees pane, and then click Rooms. You may need to click the More button (>>) to see the Rooms option.

Step 2:  Specify the number of rooms you want to create.

Step 3:  If you chose Manually Assign, you can drag attendees to specific rooms. In the Attendees pane, click an attendee’s name, and then drag the attendee’s name to a room.

Step 4: To activate the breakout rooms, in the Attendees pane, click Start. All attendees will see a transition page, and then they will move to their assigned rooms. Within the breakout room, attendees and presenters can perform the usual meeting tasks. Computer audio and audio conferencing is currently unavailable for the breakout rooms, attendees can use the non-verbal communication tools to communicate with each other for example online chat, Q&A, white board, text screens and content sharing.

Attendees can use the non-verbal communication tools to communicate with each other for example online chat, Q&A, white board, text screens and content sharing.

Step 5:  To send everyone back to the main room, you must first stop the breakout rooms. In the Attendees pane, click Stop. Optionally, you can clean up the breakout rooms and any content that was created by clicking Options, and then clicking Delete Contents of All Breakout Rooms or Delete All Breakout Rooms.