Getting the best from Zoom

This feature provides a virtual waiting room for your attendees and allows you to admit individual participants into your meeting at your discretion.

• How to turn on a Waiting Room

You can take meeting security even further by requiring a password to join your meetings. This feature can also be applied to your Personal Meeting ID.

• How to set passwords for meetings and webinars

When scheduling a meeting, you can require attendees to register with their email, name and custom questions.

By default, Zoom also restricts participants to those who are logged into Zoom.

• How to set up registration for meetings

We recommend you only allow people with University of Essex logins to access meetings where possible.

This can be done when scheduling a meeting in Meeting Options, by Enabling ‘Only authenticated user can join’ and then select ‘Essex Only’ from the drop down box.

Your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) is the default meeting that launches when you start and ad hoc meeting. Your PMI doesn’t change unless you change it yourself,  which makes it very useful if people need a way to reach you.

But for public meetings, you should always schedule new meetings with randomly generated meeting IDs. That way, only invited attendees will know how to join your meeting. You can also turn off your PMI when starting an instant meeting in your profile settings.

• Learn more about your Personal Meeting ID (PMI)

When you lock a Zoom Meeting after it has started, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password (if you have required one).

• How to lock a meeting

Allowing participants to screen share in a meeting can be a great way to collaborate, but that can also leave you open to unwanted interruptions during larger meetings.

You can easily toggle this feature on and off from the screen sharing menu, as well as the security menu.

We recommend you set screen sharing to Host Only.

• Learn more about sharing your screen

When you do remove someone, they can’t rejoin the meeting. But you can toggle your settings to allow removed participants to rejoin, in case you remove the wrong person.

• Managing participants in a meeting
• Allowing removed participants or panelists to rejoin

In-meeting file transfer allows participants to share files through the in-meeting chat.

Turn this off to keep the chat from getting unwanted content.

• How to disable in-meeting file transfer

• Do not tick "Enable join before host" as you will not be able to moderate the meeting from the beginning. Also, if you are recording the meeting at the same time, this prevents receiving dozens of separate recording notifications of participants joining early.
• Always tick "Only authenticated users can join – AND specify Essex Only". This means participants must login to Zoom and use their Essex account to do it, providing full accountability. Another options is for "Zoom Login" but participants can create a "throwaway" email account that is not traceable.
• It’s always safer to record the meeting to the cloud. This will record the audio transcript, chat and video feed – so combined with ‘Essex Only’ authenticated users will provide robust accountability measures.

• Share screen should be limited to Host only – this is done from the arrow next to your “Share Screen” button, where you can change the Share Screen privilege from “Host and Participants” to “Host Only”. This should always be done first, if you’re not planning to have presentations, etc.
• Do not allow participants to change their names – this is less important if you use authenticated “Essex Only” users, but can be used if you want to. Even if a student changes their name, you can source their Essex email address and original name in a Report after the meeting takes place.
• Chat restricted to Host only – This can be used if the Chat function becomes a distraction but you still want to be able to take input / questions. You can open the “Chat” panel and click the three dots icon at the bottom of the panel for more options.
• Mute all participants on entry, with the option not allow to unmute – This can be useful for when you have unintentional background sounds from some participants. You can open the “Participants” panel and click the three dots icon at the bottom of the panel for more options. Even if you mute all with no option to unmute, you can always ask individual students to unmute to present or ask questions.

If you experience any disruption or interruptions that are inappropriate, then you can easily identify the individuals and evidence their actions if the above guidance has been followed:

• A recording of a meeting or webinar will have a transcript of the audio feed, recording of the video feed and summary of the Chat and Q&A logs too.
• You can run a report for the participants in your Meeting / Webinar by going to Zoom in a browser, clicking on the “Reports” tab, and then the “Usage” option. Select the meeting in questions and then scroll across so you see the number of participants which is hyperlinked. Clicking on this takes you through to a list of participants which you can export to an Excel document.

For webinars you can invite external users as a panellist and this will allow them to bypass the Essex users only restriction while maintaining security to stop unwanted people joining the webinar.

1. Go to https://essex-university.zoom.us/webinar/list
2. Click into the webinar you would like the external to access.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page to the invitations section.
4. You can then click 'edit' to to right of the panellists section to enter their email.

They will then receive a specific link by email that they can use to join with on the day.

 You will need to remove the Essex only restriction and enable a waiting room that catches external accounts allowing you to manually admit them. Anyone logging in with an Essex account will be admitted automatically.

This will give you and your Co-Host a chance to stop any unknown people joining.

1. Go to https://essex-university.zoom.us/meeting#/upcoming
2. Click into the upcoming meeting you want to update.
3. Click 'Edit Meeting'
4. Tick 'Waiting Room' in the security section
5. Scroll to 'Require authentication to join' 
6. Select 'Sign into Zoom'
7. Click 'Save'
8. Go to your Personal Settings: https://essex-university.zoom.us/profile/setting
9. Under 'Waiting Room Options' Click 'Edit Options'
10. Tick 'Users not in your account'
11. Click Save

Please note that the last step will apply to all your meetings that have waiting rooms enabled. You will need to revert, the changes made in steps 8 - 11, back if you want Essex users to be held in the waiting room.

Learn more about waiting rooms.