 If you use Zoom, you may be interested to know that you can now add video into your Zoom meeting waiting rooms. And I'm gonna tell you all about it in this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And Zoom released a new version of their meeting client this week. So if you are using Zoom, be sure to go and check for updates and make sure you are running the latest version. And there were quite a few new features in that release. I'm not gonna go through them all. There is one in particular though that I want to just highlight because it's something I've been waiting for for a while. It's been in the beta version for a while and so I'm glad that it's made it into the actual software release. And that is the ability to add in a video into the waiting rooms for your Zoom meetings. Why is this interesting? Well, this means that basically when you set up a meeting and you have the option to toggle on the waiting room function, and I'll be showing you how to do that shortly, it means that when your guests arrive, then you are able to basically show them a video. And that can be obviously useful for a number of reasons. I'm sure your imagination can do the work there, but maybe you want to show your corporate video, something like that related to your company. Maybe you want to have a video showing the different services that you can offer. Maybe it is for a little reel of testimonials or things like that. Maybe you are using it for education and you want to talk about things that people need to do to prepare for the meeting that they're just about to attend or the class that they're just about to attend. Or maybe talk about your other course offerings. Whatever it is, as I say, I'm sure your imagination can do the work, but it enables you to give a much more sort of branded experience to people who are joining your meetings. So how do we do this? Well, the way you enable it is in the web settings. So if you are familiar with Zoom, you'll know that there are two different places where you can adjust settings in Zoom. The first being in the app itself, where you can click on the little cog wheel and then go and change all of your preferences in there related to the meetings themselves. But then there is also a whole load of other settings that you access through the Zoom website itself, logging into your account and changing things there. So that is where we're going to be looking today. So I'll come over to that section now. So I've logged into my account and normally it will take you into this profile section up at the top left. But what we want to do is come down to here to the settings and I would always recommend with any application or any service, just go through and have a look at all of the settings because you may discover some features that you didn't know were there just by going and having a look at those things. That's what I do when I sign up to any new service or any new application. I always do go and check. Check all of the options on the menus to see what's available. But here we don't actually have to look very far. So as I say, there are loads here that you can go and dig through. I'll leave you to do that in your own time. A little bit of homework. But where we're going to go is basically just to the very top here at the waiting room section. So it may be off by default and it's up to you whether you want to turn that on. So why indeed would you want to use a waiting room anyway? Well, the purpose of it is so that if other people have either your meeting ID or you've maybe shared the link publicly because you've got to share it with lots of people and you just want to make sure that everybody who is actually coming into the meeting is meant to be there. Well, enabling the waiting room means that you'll get a little notification when somebody actually tries to join the meeting. It will say the name of the person who is there, who is trying to access it and you can decide whether you want to allow them to come in or not. This, by the way, is a great reason to use co-hosts with Zoom as well. So if you are running large meetings, you as the meeting host won't want to necessarily be distracted by letting people into the meeting. But assigning people as a co-host is a great way to do that because that allows them to then manage the people who are coming in and out and all of those sorts of things. By the way, this is all the sort of stuff that I cover in my ultimate Zoom masterclass, which is still not quite launched, but any day now. And you can go over to zoommasterclass.com to register your interest there and you'll get a 50% off when the course does indeed launch. So head over to zoommasterclass.com if you want to take your Zoom mastery to the next level. But I digress. So that is why you would want to have the meeting room just to be able to control who is coming in and out. The waiting room, I should say. You can leave it off here and do it on an ad hoc basis. So I shall show you how to do that in a little while as well. But let's just assume we are gonna turn this on all of the time. Now, you do have some further control over it. So once I toggle it on, you do have some further control over how this will actually behave. And the way that we adjust that is if we come over here down to the, where it says edit options just down here. And you can see that the way it's set at the moment is everyone will go in the waiting room. It tells you there. Well, you can actually change that behavior. So if I come into edit options, it brings up these different options. So at the moment, who should go into the waiting room? And as you can see, it says everyone. Well, what you can also do is you've also got this one here. Users not in your account. Sorry, users not in your account yet, meaning that anybody who is on your account, if you've got a pro level or above Zoom account and you've got multiple different people actually in there, you may not want to have those people wait. So that is one option. Or the other option is users who are not in your account or are not part of your whitelisted domains. So there is a way to whitelist domains in Zoom. All of that's covered in the course. But that enables you to basically, if you're working with various different clients and different people within those organizations, you can just whitelist the whole of those domains so that then those people won't have to wait as well. So that they're sort of pre-approved. So those are three options there. So there is a case of either of these three options. And here you can just add in the domains there. So that is a case of choosing one of those three. But in addition to that, you can also check one of these two boxes. And this is users invited during the meeting by the host or co-host will bypass the waiting room. So that one I have checked on because it does make sense to me that if I've copied the invite during the meeting and I've just sent it out directly to somebody, I want those people to be able to come in. So that one I have checked on. And then the next one is allow participants in the waiting room to reply to co-host that enables two-way communication. But do just note that by enabling this, it says all participants using older versions of Zoom will be asked to upgrade their clients before joining the meeting. Now, this is a common thing with a number of different Zoom features is that it does require the guest to be on the latest version as well. So this is one of those instances. And so that would mean that as they were joining the meeting, it would prompt them to upgrade their Zoom. So it's up to you whether you want to have that. That might cause a little bit of disruption. So it might be best to leave that off in the first instance given that maybe most people might not have yet upgraded their Zoom package. And so the last thing you potentially want in the middle of waiting for people to join a meeting is for people to be starting to upgrade their software. So that one you may want to just use at your discretion. The next one is if the host and co-hosts are not present or if they lose connection during a meeting, move the participants to a waiting room if the host drops unexpectedly. Well, if you want to be in full control of a meeting and chairing the meeting and what goes on in there, then if your connection inadvertently drops, you may just want to move everybody out to the waiting room so that then the meeting can resume properly when you are able to re-establish your connection. Again, that is just down to your personal use case and how you see that going. So once you have changed those, just be sure to click continue if you want to save those changes or cancel, if not. So all of that was a bit of an aside really to the main topic of this video, which is the video during the, in the waiting room itself. And to do that, we come over to this option down here, which it says customize waiting room. So once I click on that, this is basically the standard thing that people see in a waiting room. It says the host will let you in soon. And then just underneath, it has the name of the meeting. That's the behavior that everyone's probably familiar with if you've joined meetings. You do have the option to change this. So maybe instead of saying the host, maybe I want to actually be a bit more personal and say Alec will let you in soon. So you can do that. And as you can see, it's just updated that text over there. The other thing you can do is you can actually add a logo. So if you want to go one step further with a little bit of branding, then you do have the option to add in a logo and a description. So here you can upload your logo. And as you can see here, it needs to be up to one megabyte. And it can be either a JPEG, PNG or GIF. And the minimum width or height should be 60 pixels. And the maximum, no more than 400 in either the width or the height. And then you can also enter a description. So this is basically going to appear. He says trying to type and do two things at once. I've figured out that I can't actually type. And look at that, that's terrible, isn't it? A best description. So there we go. What have you typed in here? You've got up to, in fact, let's have a look. You've got up to 400 characters. So that will appear here and then your logo can appear above. So that is one way that you can customize the experience for your users. The other thing that you can do though is the one that I'm talking about today, you can actually add a video. And so that is by clicking on here. And then all you need to do is click on the upload, upload the video. And as you can see, it needs to be no more than 30 megabytes. And then it can be MP4 MOV or M4V format. And once you've uploaded that video, that will then appear on the waiting screen. And it will auto play, but then they'll also have the option to pause it, rewind it, and all of those sort of meeting controls as well or video controls, I should say as well. So as I say, this is a great way to add a sort of custom branding to your meeting waiting rooms. I should also say that once you've uploaded the video, you also have the option here to see what it's gonna look like in mobile, not forgetting that some people will be joining on their mobile phones. And all you do then is once you've made all the changes you want to do is you just click save. And that then will, when somebody joins the meeting, they'll be presented with your custom message, just for them. It is a global setting though. So if it is something that you're going to be running different meetings, then if you want to change this out, you would need to come in here to change it out on a meeting by meeting basis, because it is just one video. You don't have the ability to assign a specific video to a specific meeting just yet. However, speaking of custom meetings is if you don't want to have the waiting room on all the time, but you do just want to have it on for certain things. So maybe you don't want your video shown to absolutely every meeting. Then the other option is you can just toggle the waiting room off here and then actually just set it up on an ad hoc basis on a meeting by meeting basis. And so the way that you do that is when you actually come to create a new meeting, so in the meetings section, then what we do here is in the meeting section you create a new meeting and you can see down here you have the option to toggle the waiting room on and off. So if you have it set as off in the global settings, then this would be unchecked. And so here you could just come and check this if you just wanted to have it on for that particular meeting. So I hope you found that useful. It's certainly something that I'll be using in my sort of business use of Zoom and it just adds that extra little bit of corporate brand identity to your meetings. And as I say, it can add some value and help the people who are just joining your meetings. Speaking of value, if you've found this useful, then don't forget to go and like and subscribe and tell your friends all about it as well. Why not? And if you've really found value in it, then you can always head over to my Buy Me a Coffee page to support me on a one-off basis or on an ongoing basis with a monthly subscription too. If you found this useful and you're interested to know more about Zoom, then I shall obviously leave a link to my Zoom masterclass down in the description as well. But for the time being, that is all for this video. But don't go anywhere. There are plenty more videos coming up next. So I'll leave a link to some of those over on the right-hand side. Have a wonderful day.