Ms Teams Breakout Rooms for virtual Barcamps

It started with the initiative of Magnus Rhode, who asked on Twitter who would like to try out using Ms Teams for a virtual Barcamp back in 2019. And as a first experiment the #teamsBC20 was organized. Read more here "Our learning journey: "Making of @TeamsBarcamp #TeamsBC20".

Having the first positive experiences and seeing that this is possible, Guido Perl and myself started to share our knowledge on how to do this within #teambayer via our #ESN and in individual sessions to inspire and enable other colleagues to spread this internally as well.

And then in March 2020 within HR Solutions we had the idea to organize a Learning Barcamp, which due to COVID19 turned out to become completely virtual. A team of engaged colleagues Tom, Anja, Kordula, Regina and Angelika took ownership and made it happen. But they did even more... they created a "How to Guide" to share their experiences #SharingIsCaring. And as this is so great, it would be a pity not sharing it public.

How to collaborate with MS Teams using Breakout Rooms 

Step 1 - Creating the overall setup

The idea of the overall set up is to first create a new teams with subchannels. The subchannels will be used for breakout sessions.

Advice: Start setting up the final structure AFTER you know the whole concept. Otherwise the participants of the channel will be able to see everything you tried out. Think of creating an own ?Try out“ channel before (which you can delete before the event).

Set up a new Teams -> click on the icon down left "Join or create a team" - Create a new team OR copy an existing barcamp setup that you might have used before if you already have a similar structure you would like to use.

Most likely make it a "Public Team" (unless content is confidential).

Make the team members owners, so they can work in the teams and create channels for each single session you want to have breakouts for by clicking on the three dots next to your teams name and select "add channel".

Make the channel accessible for everyone (?Standard“), make sure to tick the box "Automatically show this channel in everyone′s channel list"

Beside your "Break-Out" channels you might want to have a "Technial Support" channel to quickly be able to answer e.g. technical questions during the sessions. And also a specific channel for "Feedback" or "Announcements" might be worth to consider. You might want to add number in front of the names, to them into the right order).

E.g. 00 Technical Support, 01 Breakout No. 1, 02 Breakout No. 2, ... 04 Feedback,...

Step 2 - Embedding OneNote for Documentation

The idea behind embedding a OneNote in each channel is, to create a documentation plattform for the content of each session. Every participant has access to every OneNote.

Within each channel of your Teams you can find shown toolbar - Click on the ”+” - Choose the OneNote icon

Select your channel as the location for the OneNote, so the channel and the OneNote are linked. By clicking on the arrow, you can create a new section for your OneNote.

After that, your newly created OneNote can be found on the toolbar of the channel, now create a OneNote SubPage for each channel and add the relevant section of the OneNote to each channel (repeat what you have been doing for every channel")

Step 3 - Create the meeting setup

The idea is to link every channel with a Teams meeting. That gives us the possibility to open up more meetings in parallel and use them for breakout sessions.

Set up new meetings in your MS Teams calendar. Name it the same name, like the channel ist supposed to be linked with. Click in the field ?Add channel“ and search for the specific channel it is supposed to be linked with. Click on ?send“ and you will find it in your MS Teams calender, in your outlook calendar and in the channel

Repeat that for all the channels you would like to use as single meetings/ breakouts

Attention: If for whatever reason you don′t have the possibility to create Meetings directly in Ms Teams (e.g. missing O365 Outlook Integration) - you can still create those "Breakout Rooms / Meetings" in your Outlook calendar and then copy / paste into each channel. Thats not the optimal way, but it works.

Step 4 - Invitation

The full functionality can only be used by the participants, if they joined the MS Teams before the meeting starts.

When sending out the invite of the meeting to your participants, add the link to your Teams and invite them to join.

By clicking on the three dots behing your "Teams Name", you can get the link to your Teams, which you can then add to the Email invitation.

Advice: People can also get access to the meeting without being member of the Teams. However, then they can not use the chat function. By clicking ?Edit team“ you would also be able to directly add the people to the teams by yourself (if you know them already).

First, send the blocker with the general invitation to your participants so that people have their calendar blocked. Before the meeting starts, send an update with the link.

When the participants are team members, they can see that the meeting starts in the channel.

Step 5 - Switching between meetings

MS Teams offers the possibility to run several meetings in parallel. This can be used to create breakout rooms.

Start your general meeting and welcome everyone etc.

Your facilitator might also start the breakout sessions in parallel.

By the little camera icon, the teams members can see where open sessions in the channel are (only if scheduled via Teams Calendar). Attention: One person can only attend 4 meetings at a time.

People can join a breakout room by clicking on the channel. Simply click on “Join” and the other meeting will open (in parallel), while the hold the initial meeting. 

Advice your participants not close/hang-up the first session. The general call, which they have left to join the breakout, will automatically be “on hold”, and they can re-join later. If by any case they hang up, they just have to join again.

PRO-TIP: When being in the general session and to make it easy for people to join the breakouts, you can copy the typical link from the invite: "Join Microsoft-Teams..." and add them all into a Powerpoint Slide together with the relevant session name. Then when sharing the screen, you dont share "Desktop" or "Window", but "File" and select the Powerpoint. With this it becomes interactive and people can directly click on the link and jump into the "Break-Outs" without going to the channels.

If you as facilitator have more then one session open (or if participants should jump from one room to the other, they can just click the "Play" button and with this switch between meetings.

Whatelse....

Use OneNote, WhiteBoard, Excel or whatever you want to work together (this is I guess worth a separate blog), we often use OneNote because you can "draw", "write" etc, but be aware that the "sync" is not real-time, which can create issues.

If you want to record sessions, be aware, that typically only the person who has created the invite can do this. So you need the facilitor to create the meetings like mentioned above and not one person only. And ask specifically all participants and make them aware, pending on Company Guidelines, there might be different rules to be followed.

Also keep in mind, that you need a time keeper for everyone session to ask people to come back to the general session after the break-out.

Have someone who is really good in using the technology to help people directly or with their questions in the "Technical Support" Channel.

You might want to use Ms Forms to collect feedback or just ask them to write feedback into the specific channel afterwards.

Yes, I know, that those kind of things might be easier with Zoom or any other software... but this is not the point. This is about: If I have Ms Teams (and are not allowed to use other things) I can still run this kind of virtual BarCamps, Learning Sessions etc.

Never stop learning! Try it out... adjust... make it better...

Final words

I would first like to say thank you to Magnus Rode, Julia Wieland, Kathrin Bischoff, Guido Perl, Nicole Grube, Oliver Ewinger and Oliver Pinkoss for the great learning experience with the #TeamsBC20.

And then special thanks to my HR Solution colleagues at #teambayer Tom, Anja, Kordula, Regina and Angelika who made the first HR internal #Learning BarCamp happen and even more wrote this "How to" for internal use.

Also thanks to Vesa Nopanen, whose blog about BreakOutRooms appeared in April and from which we got also additional information - also worth a click and flip through as some additional aspects are considered.

And finally thanks to all those who support lifelong learning by applying #SharingIsCaring on Twitter, Linkedin, Yammer or in any other ESN.