I would like to suggest the following improvements for the Breakout Rooms feature.
Let me give you some context.
I use Zoom for Al-Anon, a peer to peer support organisation for families and friends of alcoholics, that operates mainly through regular meetings. Most of those meetings are held on Zoom and there are also conferences and special events in the virtual space due to Covid.
We use breakout rooms to welcome newcomers and also during business conferences, when we are managing motions and voting about several issues. We are encountering a lot of unnecessary problems with the breakout rooms functionality.
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Most important: being able to change settings per individual room
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Have the ability to assign and unassign people to a room, separately per room
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Have the ability to add a new room AFTER existing rooms are open and running
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When assigning people to a room, being able to influence the order of the picklist OR have the picklist come up in alphabetical order. Currently it looks like the list is in the order people come in which makes it impossible to find people in an efficient way - a search box would be very helpful too
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Have people return to ‘unassigned’ after they have left the breakout room or have been moved back into the main session by a host or co-host
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Have the ability to create breakout rooms for a meeting before it goes live without the restriction of just being able to do this with registered Zoom account holders. Some meetings always have need for the same series of breakout rooms. It would be wonderful to define them in the Zoom account so that they are always there when a new occurrence of a recurring meeting is started/opened
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Have the ability to change room settings - currently the only place we can determine if a room is pre-assigned or manually assigned is when we create the rooms
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Make the tools icon for room settings more prominent and remain visible and editable even after the rooms are opened
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Re-use existing breakout rooms without inviting previous participants in it: clearing all assigned using an ‘unassign’ option
Some more background:
When we run a business conference with several motions and voting instances, the participants often need to go into a breakout room to consult about and draft their motion.
For motion 1 this is not an issue.
But then comes motion 2, by different participants.
If I were to use the exact same consultation breakout room for motion 2 and re-open the existing room, the motion 1 participants also get re-invited.
The only solution I have found for this phenomenon is to first delete the first breakout room and then re-open the rooms that were already defined. This is not very intuitive and it has a lot to do with feature request #0:
The functionality of the breakout rooms would be greatly improved if the settings were not one for all.
In our organisation some of the meetings going on in breakout rooms have an invite only guest list. If these meetings are running and I now want to open up a second and third room that participants can individually choose to attend, this conflicts with the invite only rooms.
Best regards and thanks for your consideration.
Nicky