As part of the remote team here at Employflex, we have been using ZOOM for a few years with absolutely no complaints – it works perfectly for our daily team meetings, we run training and career coaching sessions and also host webinars with ease. It’s user friendly, easy to use and the free ZOOM package works really well for small teams.
However, ZOOM is getting a bashing at the moment in the media with people telling horror stories of ZOOM bombers getting access to their webinar and/or meeting. ZOOM have actually brought in some security features so we would encourage you to update your app when prompted.
We are not working for ZOOM, but seeing as the whole world is now using ZOOM as well as many organisations running their webinars via this video conferencing tool , we thought we would share our 10 tips on how to make your meeting/webinar a safer place:
- Make sure all your meetings are password protected. Do not share the meeting details and password publicly. Warn attendees not to share details of meeting also.
- Set up waiting rooms where people are allowed into the meeting room by the host. If you see an email address that looks suspicious or out of place, you do not allow into the meeting
- Do not allow participants to share their screen
- Disable file transfers for participants
- Mute all participants and only allow host to unmute
- Restrict chat options in larger meetings
- Have a co-host to help manage a meeting if there are a large number of people in it ( Pro ZOOM only). This will allow the main host to focus on the presentation while the co-host can manage panelists/chat/Q&A
- Lock the meeting – once the meeting has started and everyone is online, lock the meeting so that no-one else can join. For large meetings, you could do this a few minutes into the meeting leaving time for stragglers
- Enable ‘Do not allow removed participant to rejoin’
- Scroll through all the settings for each meeting and webinar and choose the most secure options which are being updated by ZOOM regularly
If you are interested in us running ZOOM training for your organisation, let us know how we can help.