Breakout rooms API

Feature Requests
22

Thanks for your input Eric!

-Tommy

23

I agree with other on this chat. Controlling Breakout rooms via API is a critical success factor for many of my meetings and those I attend. The issue is not just assigning users one time, but reassigning them for:

  1. mixing up room attendees with multiple breakout room sessions within one meeting. Zoom algorithm for auto assigning to breakout rooms falls far short here.
  2. Giving users in a webinar or even regular zoom meeting the ability to automatically assign themselves or even start their own breakout room.
  3. Adding a waiting room screen if a user wants to enter a breakroom which may have a user limit of 2 or 3 people.
    An API would make it easy to provide these types of capability in a very controlled manner. I wish this were a higher priority. Every business networking group and every educator in the world using zoom today desperately need these functions. I would have these capabilities ready within a couple weeks if you exposed the breakout rooms through an API. I would prioritize this immediately behind your security updates. Just my opinion. These features are incredibly sticky.
7 Likes
24

Hey @dmhirschfeld,

Thanks for your use cases. I will add these to the feature request.

Thanks,
Tommy

2 Likes
25

I also vote for this enhancement. This is badly needed. During an online Conference it turned out that manually assigning attendees to breakout rooms ended in chaos and frustration to a lot of people.

2 Likes
26

+1 on breakout room API. This feature is critical for a zoom marketplace application we are developing. We need the ability to:

  • allow host account to create or add/remove any participant to/from breakout rooms
  • allow arbitrary participants (w or w/o) accounts to create breakout rooms
  • set breakout room size limits
  • +1 to waiting room feature for when a user enters a breakout room thatā€™s full
1 Like
27

@trip41 @tilo.thiele @dmhirschfeld

We appreciate and understand the demand for Breakout Rooms API, and have made note of this in the feature request to our, Product and Engineering, stakeholder teams. Your input, use-cases, and technical requirements are most valuable (thanks for those details @trip41), so please share them here so we can include them for consideration.

Current events are pushing our product to be used in new and wonderful ways. Once our stakeholders have an opportunity to review this feature request, they will make the decision on the priority this request is given (in relation to the hundreds of new feature requests weā€™re receiving).

In the meantime, you will need to work with what is available and documented in our API, Webhooks, and SDK documentation.

1 Like
28

Thanks - itā€™s understandable that youā€™d be seeing incredible demand for new features given the times. Despite this, I happen to believe that your best bet would be to enable developers with features (like this one), rather than focus on end-user features. Every new api feature made available to a developer could reach hundreds or thousands (or more!) end users.

thanks

ryan

2 Likes
29

I love your passion @trip41!!!

But hereā€™s the reality of things sir: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/

30

I realize nothing is going to change short term, but here is a bit of feedbackā€¦

We could not use breakout room pre-assignments as most of our participants donā€™t have zoom accounts and our integration gathers input from the participants and we derive breakout groups based on that data.

As mentioned in a post above as a proof of concept we created new meetings instead of breakout rooms in order to enable our rich virtual conference workflow.

We used the web sdk to auto-switch participants into and out of those (breakout) meetings.

We found that the audio and video quality of the browser version of zoom is not good enough at this point.

We abandoned a fallback to launch the native zoom app as there apparently is no api to send chat messages to a meeting chat (rest API support chatting in meetings) and thus no way to tell participants to come back to the main meeting.

1 Like
31

Thanks for your feedback @frank.becker,

This is valuable, and we will work on getting this on our roadmap sometime in the future.

-Tommy

32

Thanks Zoom Staff team for your followup and answers and thanks to my colleagues to share this request.

From Buenos Aires Iā€™m adding my vote on this feature, and Iā€™ll be attentive for news.

Thanks

2 Likes
33

Thanks for your interest! :slight_smile:

-Tommy

34

Thanks for you comments Frank. I wrote another post making a case for breakout room API by spelling out several use cases. I want to add to your comment that my team also abandoned several marketplace apps initiatives because thereā€™s no way to manage or interacts with in-meeting chat messages. To Zoom: If this API feature is exposed, please allow rich text, 2[user], etc. capabilities. This would give app developers the ability to build marketplace apps that will completely empower online meetings and take zoom to a whole new level. The Breakout Room API is still # one in my opinion and In-Meeting Chat API is #2.

1 Like
35

The following is an elaboration of use cases for why a Breakout Room API is critical and how it could could simulate the naturally behavior during networking events, just before and after a company meeting, just before and after a class period, during a classroom ā€˜break into small work groups for 5 minutesā€™ session, etc. It would also facilitate educators and businesses meetings to go in and out of miro assembly scenarios:

  • After the general meeting, or during breakout periods, which can be controls by the host: Letā€™s say Iā€™m in a meeting and I want to connect one on one or one on two with various attendees. There should be a Participants list visible to all attendees who have allowed session invites. From the list, attendees can click a ā€˜Letā€™s Connectā€™ button next to their name. 2 cases:

    • During the main meeting: Notifications to Invites to breakouts are silent and cannot be responded to until during a Breakout Period set by the Host. If two users request each other, they are automatically joined together in a breakout session. If multiple people request to connect with the same person, participants are queued into a waiting room. Any users who have both requested each other, are put to the top of the waiting room.
      ** During the breakout period: All users who cross connected are joined into a breakout room (In the case that a participant has multiple cross connection requests, the breakout sessions are created in the timestamp order that each connection requests was submitted. All one sided requests have lower priority in a waiting room queue to others where both participants requested each other.
      ** Breakout Room (BR) Size: The host has the option to set the max BR size, to set the Max number of BRs, or to allow participants to self organize and set their own max BR size. Continuing with the case where participants set their own BR size, When two participants join a BR, the smallest max size of all the participants overrides that of any other participant. For example, if participant A set their max BR size as 2 (participant A + 1), they will remain in a waiting room until the desired BR is empty. This is analogous when someone in a networking meeting, waiting to approach another person until the crowd around her has cleared.

I realize there are several more use cases such as when a user is simultaneously in multiple waiting rooms, how to manage waiting room queues when a participant is simultaneously in a BR and in one or more waiting rooms ahead of other in their respective queues. I also didnā€™t elaborate on the first two cases mentioned above, where the host sets the max BR size and max # of BRs. All those other cases can be documented and easily managed to make the breakout experience for participants, in school, business, and others, natural and realistic giving the Zoom world the feeling they are participating in real in-person meeting, something the world is missing terribly during COVID. I really believe if these capabilities become available, Zoom can replace many meetings and conferences, because it will more closely simulate the real experience eliminating many of the costs of meeting in-persons. It will also make hybrid meetings way better (groups meeting in person with other meeting through zoom in the same meeting).

Another minor feature request but would eliminate a huge nuisance is the ability to right Click on a gallery image, and Send message, &/or use a shortcut to send a pre-writing message like my contact info, or ā€œIā€™m really excited to eMeet you.ā€ It is such a pain to constantly cut and paste or type the same message over and over again during a business conference or networking meeting. Itā€™s also a pain when Iā€™m staring at someoneā€™s face to have to search for their name in the chat window which might be on another screen when I could so easily right click their face, or click a note icon position in the corner next to their face. I know this is a tiny thing, but not only annoying, but itā€™s terribly distracting when Iā€™m trying to talk with people.

I know you guys have your hands full and have been doing an incredible job even before COVID, but especially during COVID. Zoom should also be put on the heros list for the contribution itā€™s making to keeping the world connected.

2 Likes
36

Hey @dmhirschfeld,

Thanks for sharing these use cases, and for the kind words! We will continue doing our best to support everyone, and to try to fit this into our roadmap soon! :slight_smile:

I will keep this thread updated!

-Tommy

39

Hi there,

another +1 to breakout room API here!

3 Likes
40

Thanks for your interest @jvillanu.

-Tommy

41

I would like to also register my interest in the breakout room API from the perspective of a educator.

It would be great to be able to give my class a poll (either with Zoomā€™s poll feature, or a more fully feature classroom response tool), and auto assign breakout rooms based on responses. In particular, for a multiple choice question I could then ensure each breakout room has students with differing answers, encouraging discussion.

Having this API feature for Fall 2020 (ideally a bit before) would have a huge impact on the way I can teach my classes.

2 Likes
43

Thanks for your input @mark.santolucito. I will keep this thread updated with any timeline.

-Tommy

44

+1 for breakout API We have a speed networking method that weā€™re growing nationally, and it is quite labor intensive to move people manually to breakout rooms, though it works for up to 30 right now . Have a algorithms for up to 100 participants, just need the means.

Also +1 for chat API/Rich Text

3 Likes