Controlling Access to Zoom Meetings

Zoom provides a few options for controlling who can access a Zoom meeting you have scheduled. When scheduling a Zoom meeting, you have two main ways to limit access to your meeting:

Require a Password

When you schedule a meeting, zoom is now automatically adding a password in the Require Meeting Password box. You can un-check this box, and the  default password will disappear. If you leave the password, it will be required for participants to join your meeting. You can change this password to whatever you want it to be.

This password information will automatically be sent to users if using google calendar. Anyone you explicitly invite to your meeting will get a link to join that will have the password embedded in the link, so they will be allowed right into the meeting. If someone else tries to join your meeting by meeting ID or with the generic meeting link, they will be prompted for the password and not allowed to join if they don't provide it. 

See Zoom's documentation on Scheduling Meetings for more details.

Enable Waiting Room 

The waiting room feature in Zoom, when enabled for a meeting, will place participants in a waiting room and not join them into the meeting until the host grants them access. This can be very useful in public meetings for which you want to screen participants before they join. The waiting room can also be useful if you are holding office hours in a single continuous Zoom meeting and you don't want more than one student to join at a time. 

To enable waiting room for a meeting, simply click the enable waiting room setting when scheduling a meeting or during a meeting, click the more options menu at the bottom of the participants list and enable the Put Attendee in Waiting Room on Entry option. 

For more details on using the waiting room in Zoom see their blog on Securing your Meeting with Waiting Room.

*NEW* Security Tab 

Zoom has now added a Security tab while in the meeting. These options include Lock Meeting, Waiting Room, and enable participants to: share screen, enable chat, rename themselves. If you use the Lock Meeting option, it will stop any new participants from entering the meeting. This would be a good option if you have not set a password and all participants that you are expecting have already joined the meeting. Waiting Room is now located under this menu. This allows you to decide when in the meeting to create a waiting room. You can still enable waiting rooms prior to the meeting as stated in the instructions above but these give you a new option to add a waiting room once a meeting has started. The security tab also allows you to allow participants to share screen, chat, and rename themselves. These options are a quick way to access some features that are frequently used. When a meeting is started, chat and rename themselves are already checked. If you need to have a participant share a screen you can quickly check this option here allowing them to share.