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

Time limits for breakout rooms should help you keep your Teams meetings on schedule.

What you need to know

• Microsoft appears to be testing an option to set time limits for breakout rooms.
• An image of the feature in action was recently shared online.
• There's also an item on the Microsoft 365 roadmap for the feature.

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.

Set a time limit is coming to Microsoft Teams pic.twitter.com/iewoLwhXay

— Aggiornamenti Lumia (@ALumia_Italia) March 31, 2021

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.

The Microsoft 365 roadmap has an entry for breakout room timers, which is likely what's shown off in the image.

Microsoft Teams

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Microsoft Teams allows you to collaborate with colleagues, upload files, send messages, and chat through video. It integrates with Office 365 and several other cloud services.