Managing security before your meeting - Zoom Tutorial

- [Instructor] As excited as you probably are about jumping right into your next Zoom call, I first would like to direct you to a few key features and settings that are vital to the security of all of your future calls so that when the time comes for your next meeting, the right people can join with ease, but the wrong people cannot hijack your Zoom link and join without your authorization, or do Zoom-bombing, as the kids like to call it. In addition to the importance of security, the following key settings will also improve the user experience for your participants, as well as for you, specifically as people are joining your calls. So here we are at your Zoom user preferences and specifically your profile. What we want to do first is we want to go to our meeting settings. So step one, I'm going to click on the Meetings tab. And the first place that I want to look is the personal meeting room. So remember, this is going to be the account-level settings for your personal meeting room. What I want to do is I want to go down to my Meeting Options, and I want to look at these options, enable join before host, mute participants upon entry, enable the waiting room, and only authenticated users can join. For the sake of this lesson, I'm not going to worry about recording. So enable join before host is exactly like it sounds. If you give somebody else your personal meeting room ID and they click that link, can they go into a Zoom room before you join? 99 times out of 100, I would say this is probably a bad idea, so I make sure that at the default level this is disabled. I do want my participants to be muted upon entry. The reason this is important is if somebody is fumbling with their settings or just putting on their microphone or there's background noise, I want to make sure that that's managed. And if they come in during a call, they don't interrupt the flow of my call. And then the most important feature you need to understand for call security if the waiting room. This is exactly like it sounds. If your waiting room is enabled, that means that anybody that clicks on any one of your Zoom links cannot be admitted into your Zoom room without your permission during that call. I can't imagine a scenario where you wouldn't want to have your waiting room enabled. But if for some reason you want to change any of these settings, you just go to Edit this Meeting, and you have the option to change any of these default settings. But keep in mind right now, this is only for your personal meeting room. I've gotten to the place in the past where I've said, "Wait a second, I changed all these settings, "why don't they work?" It's because this is only for your personal meeting room. If you want this to apply to meetings that you have already scheduled, if we go to Upcoming Meetings, let's say that I'm going to do a meeting with my internal team, I would click on Team Meeting, and the settings for every individual meeting that you create or your recurring meetings are going to be in here on a meeting-by-meeting basis. So, yes, if you have already created various recurring meetings and these settings are incorrect, you're going to have to go one by one by one and change your meeting settings. However, in the future, if you want all recurring meetings that you create to have the same default settings that work best for you, we're going to go under Settings, and we want to go to Schedule Meeting. And you're going to see that all of these various options, as we scroll down, I'm not going to go through all of these because there are many of them, but I want you to understand that everything that happens here is going to be the default level going forwards for every future meeting that you create. So you're going to scroll through here. You're going to find any settings that make sense. The one thing that I want to point out once again is going to be the waiting room. So I'm here right now, In Meeting Advanced, and I go to Waiting Room. I always want to make sure that this is checked, but they do give you the option to uncheck it if that suits your own needs. There's also some variables where you can make the waiting room available to all participants or only to guest participants. And what is a guest participant? Well, that's pretty simple. That's somebody who is not signed into Zoom as an authorized user, and these guest participants are most likely going to be the people that are going to jump into your room and do something you definitely don't want them to do unannounced. So I will say, at the very least, you want the waiting room always enabled for guest participants. But once again, if this doesn't suit your needs, you have the ability to change preferences as you see fit. Now that you better understand the proper settings to ensure your participants are safely in a waiting room, that no participants can join the call before you initiate it, especially if they haven't authenticated themselves, and some of the other features, such as if they do join, their microphones are muted, as well as the many other settings that you can change here in your user preferences, you are now ready to conduct smoother and more secure Zoom meetings.