Many changes have occurred over the last three months with advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. One of these changes, which has actually been extremely useful to all of us, is our use of Zoom. Zoom has been huge for Emory, both on the University side helping to manage remote teaching and on the Healthcare side for use with telemedicine. And these are just a few of the ways Zoom has been used. We have seen an increase in the number of users from just over 8,000 in March of this year to over 23,000 now. Zoom itself has seen similar increases across all its customers. With the increases in the number of users and in usage comes heightened security concerns.
Due to this heightened need for online security, Zoom is making changes that will go into place on July 19, 2020 to increase security for both existing and new meetings.
Starting July 19, Zoom will require a passcode and/or waiting room to be enabled for ALL meetings. This change does not affect webinars.
How will existing meetings be affected?
- Waiting rooms will be enabled by default for all meetings.
- If you already have a passcode or the waiting room enabled on your existing meetings, nothing will change for these meetings.
- If an existing meeting does not have a passcode or the waiting room enabled, these meetings will now have the waiting room feature enabled. (This is in lieu of a passcode for that meeting which would have required all old meeting information to be resent to attendees.)
- For all existing meetings, the Host of the meeting MUST log in to Zoom and allow the attendees into the meeting before they can attend, unless the attendee falls into a custom category for bypassing the waiting room.
- If, as a Host, you do not log in to Zoom for your meetings, you might want to consider changing your meetings to use a passcode instead.
- There will be some options within users’ accounts to customize the waiting room to allow certain users to bypass the waiting room.
How will new meetings be affected?
For new meetings, the waiting room feature will be enabled as the default, but users will have the option to change the waiting room to a passcode before saving the meeting.
- If a passcode is chosen versus the waiting room being enabled, the passcode will be embedded in the URL meeting invite.
- The passcode will always be numeric because of cell phone users.
- If a participant joins a meeting via the desktop app or mobile app and enters the meeting ID, they will need to also enter the passcode.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as these security changes are put in place. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at videoservices [at] emory [dot] edu.
Waiting Room Info:
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000332726
Changes Info:
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000332726#h_ef88b56b-4e8b-4976-8369-a4e5bfd4cca5
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