Prevent Issues in Club Meetings
In the past two years many Toastmasters clubs have migrated their meetings to an on-line space, either in whole or in part. The most common tool these clubs use is Zoom. In this short article we provide some tips, tools and techniques for ensuring that your Zoom meetings are secure from unauthorized or malicious use. At the end, we furnish some links to Zoom Support for more detailed information.

Primary Security Tools
Zoom recommends that meeting planners use random meeting IDs, rather than use the account owner’s Personal Meeting ID (PMI). This is because the PMI is always the same. Anyone attending one of your meetings now has the ID required to attend all future Zoom meetings! Another feature Zoom recommends is the Waiting Room. Meeting attendees are automatically sent there to wait for the host to explicitly invite them into the meeting. See Zoom’s blog entry on Keep the Party Crashers from Crashing our Zoom Event for more details.
Managing Zoom Meeting Participants
There are multiple security options available for hosts when they create meetings. A few of these are discussed here.
- Restrict certain options to hosts and co-hosts
- Remove malicious participants, and prevent them from re-joining
- Move a participant to the Waiting Room
Summary
Zoom provides lots of guidance for hosts and meeting planners on its blog. Zoom hosts should be regular visitors to this site to keep up with new Zoom security and usability features. Recent articles include, “5 Essential Zoom Chat Security Features”, “How to Nail the Zoom Background”, and “Expert Advice for Hosting A Successful Hybrid Event.” Visit the blog and get up-to-date information on functions and features to keep your Zoom meetings secure.