Breakout rooms: How to add, manage, open and close

Breakout rooms are linked to a primary session and offer secondary nested breakout rooms using our default video conferencing tool

Hugh M   Last updated August 4, 2023

Table of Contents

Adding breakout rooms to a session

Managing breakout rooms

Managing breakout room details

Managing attendees assigned in breakout rooms

How to open breakout rooms

How to close breakout rooms

Adding breakout rooms to a session

Navigate to your session and select the enable breakout rooms button at the top.

Once you select enable breakout rooms, a dialogue box will appear that will give you the ability to determine the total number of breakout rooms and whether attendees are assigned automatically or manually to their respected rooms. Additionally, as an admin you're also able to control whether there will be a maximum capacity for the breakout rooms.

Once you have enabled breakout rooms for a specific session,  scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see a breakout rooms tab. Clicking into this tab will give you an overview of your session's current breakout rooms including the following:

• • assigning breakout room hosts
  • broadcasting a message to all participants
  • filtering and assigning attendees to their breakout rooms
  • renaming, deleting and adding additional breakout rooms

Managing your breakout rooms

Assigning users to your breakout rooms

Use the panel on the left side of the breakout rooms tab for a quick view of users and assigning them to breakout rooms by:

• All Attendees
• Attendee Type
• Search Field
• Watching Now (users who are currently watching the session)
• Unassigned (users who are currently unassigned to a breakout room)

When you are ready to assign users simply check the box next to their name in the list and click assign to manually choose which room they are assigned to OR us the random assign option to spread the selected users across all rooms.

Managing breakout room details

 The right section of the breakout rooms tab shows the list of the created breakout rooms. You can rename these rooms, send a broadcast message to all attendees, manage assigned attendees, and export all breakout room analytics

Once your breakout rooms are created there will be a few icons that appear to the right of the breakout room title:

• This icon will take you to the specific breakout room's settings page (similar to the settings page of the primary session). This is where you can manage this breakout room's settings such as privacy, status, meeting mode, interactive bar defaults and more.
• This icon will add the individual breakout room's URL to your clipboard so that you can quickly share links to these rooms for external users or support teams to quickly join.
• This icon will allow you to rename the breakout room.
• This icon will delete the breakout room.

Managing attendees once they are assigned to breakout rooms.

As you assign users to their rooms you will see their name appear beneath each breakout room. Next to each name you will see a few icons that you can use to manage these attendees:

• This toggle will quickly assign the user as host of their room (giving them the ability to share their screen and manage other attendees etc.
• This button will allow you to quickly move the user to another breakout room
• This icon will remove them from the breakout rooms and take them back to the primary session.

Opening your breakout rooms

Opening your breakout rooms will automatically push users to their assigned rooms. An admin will need to initiate this from the Console side of your event platform.

You have three different options when opening rooms, you can select the open all rooms button to quickly push all users to their rooms. Or you can click on the drop down of that same button to select open for hosts. Opening for hosts will only pull in users that are toggled as hosts in their rooms. This is a great way to let hosts get set up prior to others joining.
Lastly, If you want to open individual breakouts you can do this by selecting the individual breakout room(s) and from the Actions dropdown, select open rooms. A pop up will ask whether you want to open these specific breakout rooms, accept & now your attendees will be pushed into their assigned rooms.

Once breakout rooms are open

Once you have opened your rooms, attendees names will be highlighted in green when they are on the breakout room page, giving you a quick overview of who has been moved and is actively in the breakout room.

You can also broadcast a message to all rooms at the same time.

If you you have set a maximum capacity for the breakout rooms, any attendees which try entering a full room will find the following notification: 

Closing breakout rooms

When you are ready to close all rooms simple select the red close all rooms button. This will start a 30 second count down clock that will show in each room alerting users that the breakout rooms will be closing shortly. You can also force close all rooms now to instantly pull users back to the primary session.