Zoom recommends turning on registration for all publicly or widely advertised meetings to help prevent Zoom-bombing. When registration is on, Zoom creates a “registration link” that you can publicize instead of the direct meeting link. For other steps you can take to secure meetings, see Security and Zoom.

Note: Advertising through Bryn Mawr College’s Daily Digest, the Events page or a department’s web page counts as public advertisement! Links included in such posts are visible to the world and to web-crawler bots, even if your target audience is the Bryn Mawr community.

Common Registration Misconceptions

• Registration is inconvenient for hosts. Not necessarily! With the default automatic approval setting, Zoom will email links to everyone who registers for you. You don’t have to do anything else.
• Registration prevents ad hoc or drop-in participation. Not true. Zoom allows people to continue registering after a meeting starts and if automatic approval is on, they should receive a email within a few minutes of signing up.
• Registration is too inconvenient for recurring meetings. Again, not necessarily. By default, a participant registers once and receives a meeting link that works for all meetings in the series. (You can customize registration options so people have to sign up for specific sessions if you prefer.)
• Registration is so impersonal. Perhaps, but you can customize the registration page and confirmation email to make it less so.
• Automatically accepting registrations provides no security benefits, so it’s a useless inconvenience. Not true. Registration requires participants to give you a working email address in order to receive a meeting link, and Zoom has found this requirement is often enough to discourage Zoom-bombers. If a Zoom-bombing incident does occurs and you report the culprits to Zoom, the email addresses they provided if registration was on could help with identification or sanctions.

Before you Begin

In order to turn on or manage registration for a meeting, you must:

• Have a paid Zoom account. If you are a current Bryn Mawr student or employee and need to publicly advertise meetings, be sure to set up your BMC Zoom account and use it for public-facing meetings so that you can turn on registration.
• Log into Zoom via a web browser or a Moodle Zoom activity. You will not see meeting registration options when scheduling meetings in the Zoom desktop app, mobile app, or Outlook. However, you can add and manage registration to meetings you scheduled through these methods, if you log into Zoom through a web browser using the instructions below.

Turn Registration On for a Meeting

1. Log into the Zoom web portal by going to https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us and choosing Sign in with SSO.
2. Click Meetings, hover over the meeting topic, and click Edit or click Schedule a New Meeting to create a new meeting.
3. Under  Registration, check Required.

4. If this is a recurring meeting, you will be need to choose one of the following options:
   • Attendees register once and can attend any of the occurrences (default) — the registration page and confirmation emails will list the dates and times for all sessions; registrants do not have to indicate which session(s) they will attend. 
   • Attendees need to register for each occurrence to attend — the registration page will list the dates and times for all sessions; registrants can only sign up for one and the confirmation email will include info for that session. (Note: participants can sign up for additional sessions by registering again.)
   • Attendees register once and can choose one or more occurrences to attend — the registration page will list the dates and times for all sessions; registrants must indicate which they will attend, but they can choose multiple sessions.
5. Click Save.

Customize the Registration Process (Optional)

Once you’ve turned registration on for a meeting, additional Registration and Branding tabs will appear at the bottom of the management page for that meeting, as shown below.

The Registration tab list the number of registrants and the registration options for a meeting.

• By default, registrations will be auto-approved and participants can continue to register even after the meeting has started.
• To change these defaults, click the Edit link next to  Registration Options, click Edit to open the registration options window shown below.

• If you want to manually review and approve registrations before the email with the meeting link is sent to participants, change to Approval setting to Manual.
  • If you are manually approving registrations, you can check Send an email to host when someone registers to get an email alert that a registration awaits approval.
• Check Close registration after event date if you want to prevent people from signing up after your event has ended.
• Uncheck Allow attendees to join from multiple devices if you don’t want webinar attendees to be able to join from multiple devices (i.e., a computers and a phone) using the same registration.
• Uncheck the Show social share buttons on the registration page to hide the buttons inviting participants to share the registration link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email (an all-or-nothing choice, you can’t selectively hide buttons).
• By default, participants must enter a first name, last name and email address to register. Click Questions to add pre-configured fields like “Job Title” and/or Custom Questions to add your own short answer or multiple-choice questions.
• Click Save All when you have finished editing your settings.

You can customize the registration page and confirmation emails using the Branding tab (to add a logo and/or banner image) and Email Settings tab (to edit the contact name and the text including in the confirmation email).

Manage and Export Registration Lists

Note: You can only manage and export registration lists from within the Zoom web portal. 

To view a list so that you can approve or cancel registrations or resend a confirmation email:

1. Log into the Zoom web portal by going to https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us and choosing Sign in with SSO.
2. Click Meetings, find your meeting and click the topic to open it.
3. Click on the Registration tab if it isn’t already visible.
4. The top line says Manage Participants and summarizes your current registration numbers.
5. Click View at the right end of this line to view the full list.
6. Check off names and click the appropriate buttons to approve, cancel, or resend confirmation emails for the checked individuals.

To download a list of registrants with their approval status, registration date and any data collected by your form:

1. Log into the Zoom web portal by going to https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us and choosing Sign in with SSO.
2. Select Reports.
3. On the Meeting Reports tab, make sure Registration Report is selected under Meeting Type.
4. By default, Zoom list all meetings you’ve hosted within a particular time frame (this could take awhile if you host many meetings) or you can search for a particular meeting ID.
5. Find the meeting you’re interested in and click the Generate link to create the report.
6. Click on the Download Queue tab to download your report once it’s available.

Reports will be in .CSV format, which you should be able to open in any spreadsheet program. Zoom keeps meeting report data for 30 days after the end of a meeting.

Zoom “breakout rooms” allow you to split a meeting into smaller groups:

• The host or a co-host sets up the breakout rooms, either randomly assigning participants to rooms, manually assigning them, or letting them choose rooms, and clicks Open All Rooms.
• When participants join the breakout rooms, they can talk and chat with others in that room and share video and screens if allowed to in the main meeting. The host and co-hosts can remain in the main session or visit breakout rooms.
• The host or a co-host clicks Close All Rooms to return everyone to the main meeting.

Prefer video? Watch Zoom’s How to Use Breakout Rooms.

Set Up Your Breakout Rooms

The host or a co-host can start and must finish setting up breakout rooms after the meeting starts and participants have joined. This does not necessarily disrupt the meeting; participants cannot see or join breakout rooms until Open All Rooms is clicked.

Optional Pre-Assignments

If you plan to assign people to specific breakout groups and you know in advance who will be attending, you can pre-assign rooms before the meeting starts. Pre-assigned participants will appear in the correct breakout rooms when the host or a co-host clicks on Breakout Rooms during the meeting, if they have logged into the Zoom accounts associated with their pre-registration. The host or a co-host will still need to manually assign people who haven’t logged in, logged into a different Zoom account, or don’t have a pre-assignment. Pre-assignments also apply to all instances of a recurring meeting; if you want to pre-assign people to different groups each meeting, create them as separate non-recurring meetings instead.

The person scheduling the meeting must make pre-assignments and can only do this in the Zoom web portal:

1. Go to http://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us, choose Sign in with SSO, and log in with your Bryn Mawr username and password.
2. Click Schedule a New Meeting OR click the Meetings tab, find your meeting and click Edit to open the Meeting Settings page.
3. Under Meeting Options, check Breakout Room pre-assign, then click Edit, then follow the appropriate steps for your case below.

Situation A: ALL meeting participants have Bryn Mawr Zoom accounts. In this case you can use the buttons in the window to configure your rooms.

1. Click on the + by Rooms to add rooms (note: you can’t change room names here, but you can during the meeting).
2. Search for a participant and click Add to place them in a room.
3. Click Save.

Note: If you can’t find someone, they don’t have a BMC Zoom account. Use the Import from CSV option to pre-register them or wait until after the meeting starts to assign them to a room.

Situation B: Some participants don’t have BMC accounts (for example, those from Haverford or Swarthmore, which have their own institutional Zoom licenses). Use the Import from CSV option instead.

1. Click Import from CSV at the bottom of the Breakout Rooms window.
2. Download Zoom’s sample CSV file from the top of the Import Rooms and Participants with CSV window.
3. Open it in spreadsheet program (such as Excel).
4. Add the email address* of each participant and the room you are assigning them to the appropriate columns, as shown in this template. Zoom will automatically a room for each item listed in the room name column.
5. Save your file, making sure to keep it in a .csv file format.
6. Upload the file to the box in the Zoom’s Import Rooms and Participants with CSV window.
7. Click Save.

*For best results, ask participants for the e-mail address associated with their Zoom accounts (if they have one) and remind them to use that account to join the meeting. Don’t worry if some don’t or don’t have Zoom accounts, however; a host or the co-host will need to manually assign them to a breakout room during the meeting, but they will still be able to participate fully.

During the Meeting

Once the meeting has started and participants have joined (or at least started joining) the host or a co-host needs to:

1. 1. Click Breakout Rooms.
   2. If you haven’t made pre-assignments:
      1. Select the number of rooms you want and how to assign participants to them:
         • Automatically: Zoom splits participants randomly and evenly across rooms.
         • Manually: You assign participants to specific rooms.
         • Let participants choose room
      2. Click Create Breakout Rooms.
   3. The Breakout Rooms window lists available rooms and — if you chose automatic assignments or made pre-assignments — the  participants assigned to them. From this window, you can:
      • • Rename rooms: Hover over the Room name and clicking Rename.

      

      • Change the number of rooms: Click Add a Room and Delete Room buttons.
      • Add participants: Click Assign (empty rooms) or the number of participants and check the box next to their names.
      • Reassign participants: Hover over a name and click Move to specify where to place them or Exchange to specify whom to swap places with.

• • Recreate: reset to pre-assignments (if available) go back to the Create Breakout Rooms window.
  • Options: Adjust breakout room settings
    • Allow participants to choose room. Check if you want participants to be able to choose their own breakout rooms.
    • Allow participants to return to the main session at any time: Uncheck to prevent participants from returning to the main meeting if they exit a breakout room before you have closed them.
    • Automatically move all assigned participants into breakout rooms:Check to send participants who already have room assignments to their breakout rooms automatically when you click Open All Rooms.
    • Auto close breakout rooms after () minutes:Check to automatically close the breakout rooms after the specified time elapses. (If you check “Notify me …” the host and co-host will get an alert before this happens.)
    • Countdown after closing breakout rooms: Give participants a grace period to wrap up breakout conversations. Click Close All Rooms to display and start the timer; when it reaches zero, participants who are still in their breakout rooms will be sent back to the main meeting.

Start, Manage, and Close Breakout Rooms

Each breakout room is a mini-clone of the main Zoom meeting. Participants have the same permissions in the breakout rooms as they do in the main meeting. Exception: all participants can chat and mute/unmute themselves while in the breakout rooms. There is no way to change this.

• If you want participants to have different screen- or video-sharing abilities while in breakout rooms, click Security and change the settings in the main meeting immediately before you open the breakout rooms.
• Zoom cloud recordings capture only the main meeting room. If you need to record one or more breakout rooms, you will need to enable local recording for the meeting and ask someone in those breakout rooms to make a local recording.
• If you need to share documents with breakout room participants, you can:
  • Post the in the main meeting chat and ask participants to download them before opening the breakout rooms
  • Arrange for one person (a participant or co-host) in each breakout room to have the documents and be responsible of posting them to or sharing their screen to display them within that room.

As soon as the host or a co-host clicks Open All Rooms:

• If participants are allowed to choose rooms, they can click Breakout Rooms, view the list of rooms, and click Join to enter one.*
• Participants with a room assignment will be invited to Join (or be sent into the room automatically if that setting is enabled).
• Participants without a room assignment will remain in the main meeting space.

*Participants who can’t select their own rooms are probably using an older version of Zoom. The host or a co-host can manually can assign them to a room instead, and they can upgrade Zoom later to have this option in future meetings. 

While breakout rooms are in session:

• The host or a co-host can continue to make room assignments.
• The host and co-hosts can use Join/Leave buttons in the Breakout Rooms window to visit rooms.

• Zoom chats will be breakout-room specific:
  • Participants (including hosts and co-hosts) who are in a breakout room will only be able to chat with others in that room.
  • Participants (including hosts and co-hosts) who are not in a breakout room will only be able to chat with others in the main meeting area.
• The host or a co-host can click Broadcast Message to all in the Breakout Rooms window to message all meeting participants. To message a specific room, they need to Join that breakout room.
• Participants in breakout rooms can click the ? (Ask for Help) button in their meeting control bar to request that the host join their breakout group. (Only the host sees these requests.)
• The host or a co-host can click Close All Rooms in the Breakout Rooms window to end the breakout sessions.

This article explains how to set up a Zoom meeting from within the Zoom web interface or the Zoom desktop or mobile app.

For alternative ways to set up Zoom meetings:

• For an academic courses, see Schedule Course Meetings with the Moodle Zoom Activity
• If you use Outlook or Office365, see Schedule Zoom Meetings with the Outlook/Webmail Add-In

Prefer video? Watch Zoom’s How to Schedule a Meeting tutorial.

Set Up a Scheduled Meeting

1. Log into Zoom by going to https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us or opening your Zoom desktop or mobile app and choosing Sign in with SSO.
2. Click on the Schedule a Meeting (web portal, pictured below left) or  Schedule (desktop and mobile app, pictured below right).
   
3. Give the meeting a Topic (name) and, optionally, a short Description.
4. Use When to set the meeting date and start time. (For a recurring series, use the date of the first meeting.) If you want to create a meeting link without a specified date and time, skip to step 7.
5. Use Duration to set how long the meeting will last. (Note: for information only, the meeting link will still work outside of this time window.)
6. Zoom will default to your computer’s Time Zone; click the drop-down menu if you need to change this. Meeting invitees/participants will see dates and times adjusted to their own time zones.
7. Check Recurring meeting box to set up a series of meetings with the same meeting link/ID.
   • Use the Duration settings to control how often the meeting recurs — see Zoom’s article on Recurring meetings for more details.
   • Choose Duration > No fixed time to create a meeting link that is not associated with a date/time.
8. For the remaining meeting options, you can keep the default settings unless you have a specific reason to override them. (To change your  defaults for all new meetings, log into the Zoom web portal and click Settings.)
   • Meeting ID: For security reasons, LITS recommends that you usually use the default setting, Generate Automatically, which creates a new, random unique meeting ID for each meeting or meeting series. Your Personal Meeting ID remains the same across meetings: people who have it can drop in any time, and the more widely you share it, the more vulnerable it becomes to hacking/Zoom-bombing.
   • Registration required: Turn this on for added security if you will be advertising this meeting publicly. Zoom creates a registration link for you to publicize; participant click the link and must sign up with an email address to receive the meeting link. (See Setting up Registration for a Meeting.)
   • Use at least one of the following security measures to help prevent Zoom-bombing:
     • Passcode: Least disruptive; participants who don’t have the meeting link (which has the passcode embedded) will need to enter this meeting passcode in order to join.
     • Waiting Room: Hosts and co-hosts are alerted when people join the meeting and must admit them before they can participate. By default, everyone except alternative hosts will join “in the waiting room.” You can exempt people who are logged into a BMC Zoom or any Zoom account attached to email domains you specify (e.g., haverford.edu) by logging into Zoom web portal, opening Settings and editing your Waiting Room Options.
     • Only authenticated users can join: Most restrictive; participants will need to sign into either any Zoom account, a BMC, Haverford or Swarthmore Zoom account, or a BMC Zoom account before they can join the meeting.
   • Video: Specify whether the host (you or any alternative hosts) or participants start the meeting with video on or off. (Participants will still be able to turn video on unless you have disallowed this.)
   • Audio: Allow users to call in using Telephone, use Computer Audio only, or Both.
   • Calendar (desktop and mobile apps only): Save to Outlook or another calendar.
   • Meeting Options:
     • Allow participants to join anytime: Check to enable participants to join before you (or an alternative host).
     • Mute participants on entry: Check to mute participants when they join. (They will still be able to unmute themselves; for more info on muting participants during a meeting, see Managing Participants in a Meeting.)
     • Breakout room pre-assign (web portal only): Check to create the breakout rooms you will use in the meeting and, optionally, pre-assign participants to them. See Pre-Assigning Participants to Breakout Rooms for details and limitations.
     • Automatically record meeting: Check to automatically begin recording the meeting as soon as a host or alternative host starts/joins. (See Local recording and Cloud recording for details; cloud recordings will also be automatically uploaded to Panopto). Note: Be sure to inform participants in advance that you will be recording and/or pause the recording at the start of the meeting to inform them, so that they can opt out or adjust participation as needed.  
     • Approve or block entry to users from specific regions/countries (web portal only): New for 2021, use with caution.
   • Alternative hosts: Enter the email address(es) of BMC Zoom user(s) to empower them to start the meeting for you (note: they must have an account on BMC’s Zoom license). New for 2021 — if you join the meeting after the alternative host, you will become the host and they will be downgraded to a co-host (or participant if the co-host role was disabled).
   • Interpretation: Check to enable language interpretation channels for the meeting, then provide email addresses of the interpreters and language provided. See Language Interpretation for more information.
9. Click Save to finish scheduling your meeting.

View/Manage a Scheduled Meeting

All of your Zoom meetings (including any scheduled through the Outlook/Webmail Add-in and a Zoom activity in Moodle) will show up on your Zoom Meetings page.

To open the Meetings page:

1. Log into Zoom by going to https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us or opening your Zoom desktop or mobile app and choosing Sign in with SSO.
2. Click Meetings in the left sidebar (web portal) or top menu bar (apps).

Click on any Meeting to view information about it; if you created the meeting, you will see buttons to:

• Start the meeting.
• Edit the time, date, recurrence or other meeting settings.
• Delete the meeting (if a series, Zoom will clarify whether you wish to delete this occurrence or all).

Note: In the web portal, scroll beneath the summary of meeting details to see these options.

There are three meeting management options that you can only access by logging into the Zoom web portal:

• Save as Template: Use this meeting’s settings to setup subsequent meetings.
• Poll: Create questions for in-meeting polls
• Live Streaming: Configure a connection to a live streaming platform. Typically used to enable people who are not logged in to view and listen to the meeting but not participate; may be needed for certain captioning services.

Invite People to a Scheduled Meeting

To invite people to your meeting, send them the information they will need to join:

1. Log into Zoom by going to https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us or opening your Zoom desktop or mobile app and choosing Sign in with SSO.
2. Click Meetings in the left sidebar (web portal) or top menu bar (apps).
3. Click on the meeting to which you want to invite people.
4. Click Copy invitation (next to the meeting invite link in the web portal) to copy the meeting link and information participants need to phone in (if application) to your clipboard.
5. Paste the invitation into an email and send it to the people you wish to invite to the meeting.

Notes:

• You can paste the meeting link and information about how to join your meeting anywhere. However, keep in mind that anyone who has the link can join the meeting.
• Although you can paste the invitation onto a Moodle page to share it with students, we recommend you Schedule Course Meetings with the Moodle Zoom Activity instead.
• If you are scheduling a meeting that is open to the public, we recommend turning registration on and sharing the registration link, rather than posting the meeting link to a website. Meeting links posted on websites are very vulnerable to Zoom-bombing because they can be harvested by bots that crawl the web looking for them. Registration prevents this and helps with security even if you set it up so that people are automatically approved and receive the meeting links immediately.
• When sharing a meeting invitation with a mailing list or posting to a message board or other limited-access site, consider your audience. If it is small and you trust recipients not to share the link, it’s probably okay to send out the meeting link and invitation details. If it’s large or people may share widely, it is safer to turn registration on and share the registration link instead.

It is sometimes difficult to tell whether you are using a Zoom account on Bryn Mawr’s license or a separate account attached to your Bryn Mawr email address.

The clue is in your Zoom account profile:

1. Pull up your Zoom profile in a web browser.
   • If you’re logged into Zoom through your web browser, click Profile in the left sidebar menu.
   • If you’re logged into the desktop app, click your profile picture (or your initials if you don’t set up a picture) in the upper right and choose My Profile (Change Picture if you don’t have a picture) from the drop-down menu.
   • You cannot pull up your profile page from a Zoom mobile app
2. If this is a Bryn Mawr account, your Personal Meeting ID will contain https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us, as shown below.

Minimizing Confusion

We have instructions that can help you log into your BMC Zoom account, but before you do we recommend doing one of the following with your non-BMC account to avoid confusion in the future:

1. If you don’t need a personal Zoom account, delete your non-BMC account.
2. If you want to keep a personal account, change the email address associated with it to something other than your brynmawr.edu email address.
   • Log into the non-BMC Zoom account if you haven’t already.
   • Click Edit next to Sign-In Email.
   • Enter a new email address.
   • Click Save Changes.
     • Check the new e-mail address for a confirmation email similar to the one below. Click Confirm Change to complete the email change process.

• • If you don’t receive the confirmation email, log into Zoom using the old email address and password and resend the email. Be sure to check inbox folders where auto-generate mail might be routed (Spam, Junk, Other, Updates, etc.)

For help troubleshooting a personal Zoom account, please contact Zoom support — LITS cannot see information about non-BMC accounts.