Pre-assign multiple sets of breakout rooms

[MeetingMasterLJ]

Hello Everyone,

I host events for different clients with over 50 people, and in these events, I regularly use breakout rooms to facilitate different conversations to be held within the zoom meeting. More often than not I want to pre-assign these people to these breakout rooms. However, I do not seem to be able to pre-assign multiple sets of rooms in advance. 

For instance, I host an event which contains multiple rounds of workshops, and people can sign in for specific workshops before the meeting. I can only pre-assign the first round of workshops with the people that were signed in for those workshops. Workshop rounds 2 and 3 will then either require me as host to assign all people manually myself to the new rooms which costs a lot of time, or require the participants to select the correct workshop room by themselves. I would very much like a feature allowing me to pre-assign the multiple rounds in advance. Something like this:

Workshops round 1:

Room 1:

Andrew

John

Room 2:

Angela

Melanie

Room 3:

Melvin

Sandra

Workshops round 2:

Room 1:

Melvin

Melanie

Room 2:

Sandra

Andrew

Room 3:

John

Angela

Workshops round 3

etc. (you get the gist of it)

One could imagine this is no problem with a group of 6 people, but when I have to manage a group of 50+ people, this can be very time-intensive. Is there a feature I could use, or some other solution for this problem?

Note:

Allowing participants to move around through the breakout rooms by themselves is of course possible, but this leads to other problems(e.g. technical inexperience)

Thanks!

[The_WebiNerd · Accepted solution]

We have to do this often with hundreds of people. It can be stressful and requires a dedicated producer with attention on a spreadsheet and the Zoom breakout rooms menu. Bear in mind, only one person can work on this at a time and that same person has to click to start the rooms when ready or their work will be lost. 

I hope that Zoom can improve this functionality in the future. At this time, you are doing what you are able to do. You can now preassign rooms, change the assignments in session, then revert to the original assignments. This can be quirky at times and folks rejoining the meeting will need to be reassigned to their room in some cases. I feel for you!

[cassandrasines]

I also would like to see this happen. I did tech for a training and we have 11 breakouts that need to be set up. Only three of them do the groups need to be the same. It is very time consuming to have to do them manually. 

[MeetingMasters]

Do we know whether this is in the development roadmap? So that indeed when hosting an event with several breakout rounds and different people is not so stressful? Really keen to know....

[cbrunton]

I would 100% like to see this made possible. Running a networking meeting tomorrow with 5 rounds of breakout rooms, each are pre-assigned so I'll have to manually do rounds 2-5. 

[ferka]

We would also love to have this for clinical teaching.

We often need to:

1. set up a set of rooms for 2-3 people role play work

2. launch a group of small discussion groups (10 people).

3. Relaunch the same 2-3 people rooms.