Now that we’re all glued to screens for work more than ever, it’s time to up our Zoom game. From reducing visual clutter and learning keyboard shortcuts, to vitally improving call security, there are plenty of ways to reduce frustrations and make Zoom work hard for your small business.
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Get proactive about Zoom security
Check that ‘disable join before host’ is the default setting on your account, then disable screen sharing for non-hosts and the remote-control function, as well as all file transferring, annotation and autosaving chats. Once a meeting begins, lock the meeting to new participants and assign at least one other co-host who can handle anyone who might bypass your security controls and gain access to the meeting. These are all simple measures you can take to stop people from gaining access to potential sensitive business meetings, but few Zoom users have them activated.
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Share documents in your meeting
While in a Zoom meeting, head to the Chat button on the bottom bar. In the chat, you’ll see a file button to the bottom right of the chat window. You’ll be able to add a file from cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox, or share a file from your hard drive. Once selected, it’ll appear in the chat window, ready for other attendees to open a preview in their browser or download the full file.
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Use unique meeting IDs
By using a different ID per meeting (rather than your personal meeting ID), you’ll be able to run different meetings concurrently (if that’s something you need to do), as well as adding another layer of hard to guess information for anyone trying to nefariously access your meetings. Zoom’s support page has a video on how to do this.
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Keep meetings tidy
You might have heard of ‘Zoom fatigue’ which is kicking in as we all inevitably sit on multiple Zoom meetings a day. Consider ways to declutter your meetings to ease some of the amount of stuff on your screen. For instance, you can hide your own video to make more space for others’ – but it’s worth noting that they’ll still see you. You can also hide non-video participants, meaning big meetings won’t have loads of blank boxes and you can focus on watching the video links.
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Record a meeting to the Cloud
Both paid and free Zoom users can record a meeting to their desktop, providing they’re accessing the meeting from the desktop app. The recordings can then be uploaded to Google Drive, Youtube, Dropbox, or Vimeo – ideal for webinars, interviews, or creating content from meetings. If you have a paid Zoom account, you can save recordings straight to Cloud services – just tap the Record button on the bottom bar and choose between saving locally or to the Cloud. This could make keeping things for posterity – board meetings instead of taking minutes, for example – a breeze.
There we have it: five ways to make Zoom do the legwork for your business if you now use it to stay connected. Want to take it further? We’re here to help. Contact us to talk about backups, remote working solutions, or anything Cloud-related.
