Manage your Invited Participants
Here are a few great features to help secure your Zoom event and host with confidence:
- Require a password to join your meeting. Having the meeting invite alone is not enough to join, participants also need to enter the password you set. You can read more about how to set this up at Meeting and Webinar Passwords
- Only allow Berkeley Lab users to join your meeting. This is useful if you want to limit access to only Berkeley Lab users. You can read more about how to set this up at Authentication Profiles for Meetings and Webinars
Keep Meeting IDs Private
- When you share your meeting link on social media or other public forums, that makes your event public. Anyone with the link can join your meeting. Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) to host public events. Your PMI is basically one continuous meeting and you don’t want random people crashing your personal virtual space after the party’s over. Learn about meeting IDs and how to generate a random meeting ID (at the 0:27 mark) in this video tutorial on Zoom's YouTube channel.
Manage Screen Sharing
- The first rule of Zoom Club: Don’t give up control of your screen. You do not want random people in your public event taking control of the screen and sharing unwanted content with the group. You can restrict this — before the meeting and during the meeting in the host control bar — so that you’re the only one who can screen-share. The Zoom article Managing participants in a meeting has more details about keeping control of the screen during a meeting.
Use the Waiting Room to Screen Guests
- One of the best ways to use Zoom for public events is to enable the Waiting Room feature. Just like it sounds, the Waiting Room is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready to let them join. It’s almost like the velvet rope outside a nightclub, with you as the bouncer carefully monitoring who's allowed to enter.
- Meeting hosts can customize Waiting Room settings for additional control. You can even personalize the message people see when they hit the Waiting Room so they know they’re in the right spot. This message is really a great place to post any rules/guidelines for your event.
- The Waiting Room is really a great way to pre-screen who’s trying to enter your event and keep unwanted guests out.
Other Settings to Consider
Upgrade to the latest version of the Zoom Client and once the meeting has started, use the new Security button to enable the Waiting Room, lock the meeting, and limit what meeting participants can do during meeting (available to the host of the meeting).
It’s always smart to lock your front door, even when you’re inside the house. When you lock a Zoom Meeting that has already started, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password (if you have required one). In the meeting, click Participants at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the Participants pop-up, click the button that says "Lock Meeting."
From that Participants menu, you can mouse over a participant’s name, and several options will appear, including Remove. Click that to kick someone out of the meeting.
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 boot the wrong person.
You can put everyone else on hold to momentarily disable the attendees’ video and audio connections. Click on someone’s video thumbnail and select "Start Attendee On Hold" to activate this feature. Click "Take Off Hold" in the Participants list when you’re ready to have them back.
Hosts can turn attendees' video off which will allow hosts to block unwanted, distracting or inappropriate gestures on video. It's also useful for that moment when your friend’s inside pocket is the star of the show.
Hosts can mute/unmute individual participants or all of them at once. Hosts can block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise from other participants. You can also enable Mute Upon Entry in your settings to keep the clamor at bay in large meetings.
You and your attendees can doodle and mark up content together using annotations during screen share. You can disable the annotation feature in your Zoom settings to prevent people from writing all over the screens.
