Secure your meeting with the Waiting Room

- [Instructor] A recent addition to the Zoom interface was the introduction of the security button that you see down here. And that gives you access to several options for securing your Zoom meeting from unwanted or uninvited attendees. As Zoom has grown in popularity, so have reports of people showing up in meetings to harass the attendees. This has become known as Zoom bombing. But you can prevent Zoom bombing by taking a couple steps to secure your meeting room, starting with enabling the waiting room feature. The waiting room allows attendees to connect to the meeting, but they'll be in sort of a virtual holding area until you manually let them into the meeting. In addition to letting you vet the attendees before letting them in, this is also a good way to prevent legitimate attendees from talking to each other or just sort of awkwardly sitting there in silence before you arrive to start the meeting. Now to enable this feature by default for all of your meetings, go to the web dashboard. Let me just minimize this for a moment. Select settings. Go to in meeting advanced, and then scroll down and find waiting room. Here make sure it's turned on, and then you can decide whether all participants will be placed into the meeting room or just guests. Guests are anyone who's not part of your organization or who haven't signed in. If you choose this option, anyone in your company or organization will be let into the room automatically, which can be useful if you want to have a quick pre-meeting with your colleagues before letting everyone else into the meeting. I'll leave this set to all participants. By the way, you also have the option here to customize the screen people will see in the waiting room. You can change the text here, add your company logo, or add the meeting topic. I'm just going to close this and leave it as is. Now while we're in settings, I'm going to scroll up a bit, and find the setting that says allow removed participants to rejoin. This is a useful option in case you have to kick people out of your meetings. By leaving this switched off, anyone you eject from the meeting will not be able to return to it, and you won't even see a notification that they're trying to get in. So this, combined with the waiting room, gives you complete control over who can get into your meetings. Now you can also enable the waiting room on a per-meeting basis. Let's go back to the Zoom meeting that I'm currently in. So after signing into my meeting, I can click the security button, and choose enable waiting room. Once that's been set, any time anyone connects to the meeting, I'll get a notification and I can check if I recognize this person before letting them in. So you can see, for example here, that two people have entered the waiting room area. I can click see waiting room, or I could just open the participants panel, and I can see there are two people waiting here. Now if I know both of these people, or I know everybody in the waiting room, I can click admit all to let them all in, or I could remove somebody I don't recognize, or I could just click admit to let people in on a person-by-person basis. I'll add both Jess and Nick into the meeting. And there they are, they currently have their cameras and audio off, just so we don't have to worry about seeing them right now. Now additionally, once everyone has joined the meeting, I can come back to the security button and choose to lock the meeting. Doing so prevents anyone else from connecting to the meeting at this point, and anyone who tries to connect will see a message saying that the meeting has been locked, and I as the host will see no notifications or indications that anyone is trying to get in. Now the security button also gives us quick access to toggle participants' ability to share their screen, to access the chat, or to rename themselves. Previously you had to dig through the settings in the web dashboard to get to these controls, but they're now accessible from here. And again, if you need to remove a troublemaker from the room, I can do that from here in the participants panel. I could select Nick here and say remove. And say OK. Notice it says he will not be able to rejoin because of that preference that I set. And now Nick won't be able to get back into this particular meeting, and Jess and I can continue meeting. Okay so that's a rundown of the security features available during a Zoom meeting.