- Secure your Zoom meetings
- Allow external users to access meetings and webinars
- Virtual backgrounds
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Meeting etiquette
- Safeguarding
- Training
- Help
Features and settings to help secure and protect your Zoom meetings, before and during your event.
This feature provides a virtual waiting room for your attendees and allows you to admit individual participants into your meeting at your discretion.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Try to use webinars when possible - they are a better format for controlling large groups of students. You can still have Q&A and interaction, it is just easier to manager 100s of participants.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Using Zoom with video can feel as though you’re inviting someone into your home. That might be fine if you have dedicated office space, but if you’re working in your bedroom, have your children playing in the same room, or you washing hanging up behind you, then you might want to think of ways to manage your privacy.
The Virtual Background feature allows you to display an image or video as your background during a Zoom Meeting. This feature works best with a green screen and uniform lighting, to allow Zoom to detect the difference between you and your background. You can also upload your own images or videos as a virtual background.
Make sure your computer meets the system requirements for Virtual Background. If your computer can’t use Virtual Backgrounds, you’ll need to find other ways to manage your background, such as investing in a background screen, changing your camera angle or moving personal items away from camera.
Use these keyboard shortcuts to save time on common tasks in Zoom.
7 Tips to Ensure a Great Attendee Experience (Zoom Blog)
View our Online Meeting Etiquette Guide (.pdf)
Our duty of care to promote and safeguard the welfare of vulnerable groups also applies to online meetings.
Read the University's safeguarding guidance (.pdf) if you are planning to use Zoom to meet a child, for example a student or participant who is under 18 years old, or an adult at risk.