Teams Breakout Rooms - Preassigning Participants

Question

Hello

Please i need your help on this issue.

We seem to have lost the ability for a Teams Meeting Breakout Room Manager to be able to pre-assign participants before the meeting has started.

The Organizer of the meeting can do so, but not the meeting's Breakout Room Manager.

The steps that we would normally take are the following:
STEP1: Meeting Organizer creates a Teams meeting and invites the participants. They make someone a 'Breakout Room Manager'.

STEP 2: The Breakout Room Manager joins the meeting 5 minutes before the meeting is due to start. From the active Teams meeting, the Breakout Room Manager clicks the 'Rooms' icon ] Assign participants 'Manually' ] Create rooms ] Assign participants

STEP 3: From the 'assign participants' window the Breakout Room Manager assigns the invitees to the appropriate rooms. However, the issue is that there are no participants available to be pre-assigned. The participant's window is blank, it does not show any participants.

It only shows participants once the participants themselves have joined the meeting. Until now all breakout room managers had the ability to assign participants before their participants joined the meeting.

Multiple people in our company have tested this issue. We are using Teams Desktop client around version 1.5.00.31168 (64-bit)

The two workarounds are:

Either the Meeting Organizer to auto assign participants to rooms before the meeting and then the Breakout Room Manager is able to manually move people as they are already existing in the participants selection.

Or manually assign participants to rooms once the meeting has started, which adds a delay