Meeting professionals have spent the last year learning the quirks and limitations of the now ubiquitous Zoom video streaming platform, but just like almost every other tech, just when you have memorized the short cuts and found work arounds for the most egregious irritants, they come out with automatic “fixes and enhancements.” The release rolling out March 1 focuses on what is seen in meeting and webinar views, security and recording tics.
New Meeting Features
An enhancement to the custom gallery view in meetings and webinars will allow participants who turn on their video during the meeting to be added to the right corner of the last page of the gallery view. When screen sharing is not activated, participants can choose speaker view, gallery view or floating thumbnail window. Users can also pin up to 9 participants’ videos and up to 29 thumbnails per page in the gallery view. The Feb. 1 update gave hosts the option to push specific video layouts to webinar attendees in the “View Options” button. And new “Side-by-Side: Speaker” alternative was added.
To solve the problem of accidentally sharing your inbox with the world, new clearer designation of shared content will provide clear notification of what you are sharing and when they can see it.
Also, this update should fix the problem of slides used as virtual backgrounds not recording properly.
Security Enhancements
The February and March fixes build on the major security enhancements put in place in November. That is when they added “Suspend Participant Activities” and made it easier for hosts to temporarily pause meetings and remove Zoom bombers—unauthorized attendees who disrupted sessions with inappropriate content. Hosts and participants were also empowered with the ability to report a user with a screenshot.
An “At-Risk Notifier” scans public social media posts and web sites for publicly shared Zoom meeting links to further reduce the threat of unwanted guests.
The platform had already added a “Waiting Room” feature so hosts could control who joins and/or require a password. This was on top of the introduction of two-factor authentication support and enhanced encryption.
The platform, which counted 10 million daily meeting participants in December of 2019 passed 300 million by the end of 2020 and continues to develop the service to meet the growing utilization.
