This week, Microsoft began rolling out "Branded Meeting Reactions" to Teams Premium subscribers. The feature lets companies replace standard emoji reactions - like, love, applause, laugh, surprised - with custom branded versions featuring company logos, mascots, or event themes.
It's exactly the kind of feature that sounds impressive in a product roadmap and means absolutely nothing to anyone trying to teach a class.
What branded reactions actually are
Here's how it works: an IT administrator uploads custom reaction icons through the Teams admin center. These replace the default emoji in meetings. A meeting organizer can then pick a "branded theme" when scheduling. So instead of a generic thumbs-up, participants can react with a company mascot giving a thumbs-up.
This is a Teams Premium feature. Teams Premium costs $10 per user per month - on top of whatever Microsoft 365 plan you're already paying for.
Ten dollars per user per month. For custom emoji.
Meanwhile, in education
While Microsoft's product team was designing branded mascot reactions, here's what teachers using Teams for online lessons are still dealing with:
You cannot monitor multiple breakout rooms at once. When a teacher creates breakout rooms for small group work, they have to manually join each room one at a time, check what's happening, leave, and join the next one. There is no way to see or hear what's happening in all rooms simultaneously. For a tutoring teacher managing four or five groups of students, this makes meaningful oversight practically impossible.
Breakout room controls are desktop-only. Only the meeting organizer, on the Windows or Mac desktop app, can create and manage breakout rooms. Teachers on Linux, web, iOS, or Android cannot manage rooms at all - they can only be moved into rooms as participants.
The breakout room button sometimes just disappears. Microsoft's own Q&A forums are filled with teachers asking why the breakout room icon vanished from their meeting controls. The answers involve checking app versions, verifying admin policies, toggling "new meeting experience" settings, and running PowerShell commands. These are teachers, not system administrators.
Free and basic accounts can't use breakout rooms at all. Students who join with a free Teams account can't be assigned to breakout rooms. Neither can phone dial-in participants under most conditions. In a tutoring context where students join from different setups, this creates constant friction.
A question of priorities
The branded reactions feature wasn't developed in a vacuum. It took engineering time, design resources, admin center integration, and QA testing. Microsoft chose to invest those resources in letting companies put their logo on a thumbs-up emoji - and charge $10 per user per month for it.
That same investment could have gone toward solving the breakout room monitoring problem that teachers have been requesting for years. Or toward making breakout rooms work reliably across all devices. Or toward simplifying the admin experience so a teacher doesn't need to contact IT just to split students into groups.
But those features don't drive Teams Premium upsells to enterprise customers. Branded emoji do.
Who Teams is really built for
This isn't a surprise if you look at what Microsoft has been building. Teams Premium includes features like AI-powered meeting recaps, custom together mode scenes, and now branded reactions. These are enterprise engagement features - designed for companies with dedicated IT departments and per-seat budgets that make $10 per user feel like a rounding error.
Education is an afterthought. Microsoft offers Teams for Education, but the fundamental architecture is a corporate meeting tool with some educational features bolted on. The breakout room limitations aren't a bug - they reflect the fact that Teams was never designed for teaching.
A teacher monitoring five breakout rooms of students isn't a "meeting organizer." They're doing something fundamentally different from a corporate manager running a brainstorm session. They need to see who has their camera off, hear if a group has gone silent, and intervene quickly if something isn't working. Teams doesn't support that workflow because Teams doesn't think about that workflow.
What education actually needs
If you run a tutoring institution or language school and you're using Teams because "it comes with our Microsoft license," it's worth asking what that convenience is actually costing you.
Teachers need a platform where they can see and hear all breakout rooms simultaneously - not jump between them one at a time. They need something that works without an IT department configuring admin policies. They need a tool where the core teaching experience isn't locked behind a $10/month premium upsell.
They need a platform built for education from the ground up. Not one that treats education as a secondary use case while the product team focuses on branded emoji.
Simpleclass was built specifically for this. Teachers can monitor all breakout rooms at the same time - seeing video and hearing audio from every room on a single screen. No premium tier required. No IT admin needed. Because that's not a luxury feature. It's the entire point.