Breakout rooms

[Arushi66]

Hi , I'm the host of the meeting and want to make permanent breakout rooms rather than enabling them every single day . 

Can anyone help me by letting me know how is that possible to male permanent breakout rooms for once and all ?

[Ray_Harwood · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Arushi66,

The short answer is that Breakout Rooms have to be reassigned for each meeting.

However, there is a way to potentially accommodate your need, referred to as "Preassigning Participants to Breakout Rooms".  While its main purpose is the pre-assigning of attendees, it can also be used to simply create the list of Breakout Rooms to upload, each room with a single "dummy" email address in it.

See this Zoom Support article for detailed information on uploading Breakout Room information:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360032752671-Pre-assigning-Participants-to-Breakout-Rooms 

Review the Support article for how to do this for recurring meetings; you can't just assign it to one occurrence, it has to be applied to each occurrence.  Also carefully note the prerequisites and settings required.

Here's an example of how you might fill out the CSV file before uploading it:

I use that "fake" email address and it never causes an issue.  No email is sent by Zoom for this pre-assignment, it's just used to match up attendees with rooms when the Breakout Rooms are opened.  When you click on the Breakout Rooms prior to starting them, you'll see this:

Hopefully this will ease your administrative burden in setting up your meetings!

[ALOS]

Hi Ray

sorry to jump on this email but wondered if you could answer a side question for me.

I want to set up a recurring meeting with breakout rooms but I want people to be able to choose which room they want to be in.

is this possible with the dummy method you’ve proposed above, whereby, I can set up the meeting and rooms, add an email to each room and when participants join they can select the room they want to join?

For context I want to set up a space for a group of people to meet.  I will be the host with a paid pro account but I will not always be able to be there so will be enabling ‘Join without host’ and also only registered users.  Hence the wanting to set up rooms where people can self select on entry.

Is this possible?

Thankd

[Ray_Harwood]

Thanks for joining in, @ALOS

Yes, this works!  There’s a few limitations when recurring meetings are concerned. I believe it will work if you have regular recording intervals, but likely not with “No fixed intervals” type of recurrence. I haven’t tested this, but you can easily test it by scheduling a test series similar to what you’re planning, and seeing what works. Worst case – I think – you might have to import it for each occurrence. 

Let me know what you find out!