Chapter 3
IN THIS CHAPTER
Creating a new Zoom account
Downloading and installing the Zoom desktop client
Reviewing the benefits of user groups
Understanding Zoom’s different roles
Zoom allows people to easily hold high-quality videoconferences with their colleagues, partners, customers, families, friends, or students. You may be jumping at the bit to start one.
I understand your excitement, but hold the phone. It’s essential to first cover a few foundational topics. Case in point: Before you can host a meeting, you need to take care of a few things.
This chapter explains the necessary housekeeping that you’ll have to perform in order to start using Zoom in earnest. Don’t worry. You’ll be up and running with Meetings & Chat shortly.
The world is data-driven. Rare is the company today that doesn’t want to collect basic information about its users and customers. To this end, in order for you to host a Zoom meeting, you’ll have to first create an account.
Like many apps and web-based services today, Zoom requires users to establish accounts online if they want to host meetings.
To create a new Zoom account, follow these steps:
https://www.zoom.us
.In the upper right-hand corner of the website, click on the orange Sign up, it’s free button.
From here, Zoom provides you with three sign-up options via
If you select the second or third option, then Zoom makes you authenticate your new account through that service. At a high level, you are granting Zoom permission to access some of the data that you have provided to Facebook or Google.
Admittedly, this practice is quite common. For example, for years Spotify has allowed people sign up for new accounts with Facebook. When they do, new users don’t need to provide Spotify with their names, dates of birth, email addresses, and the like. Facebook already stores this information about its users — and plenty more, depending on how much they share on the social network.
Say that that thought terrifies you or you don’t use those popular services. Simply select the first option and continue.
The following instructions assume that you’re signing up for Zoom with your email address, and not via Facebook or Google.
Enter your email address and click on the Sign-Up button.
Zoom informs you that an email confirmation is on its way (see Figure 3-1).
To minimize spam and the impact of bad actors, Zoom blocks certain domains from registering new accounts. For example, Zoom rejected [email protected]
because people often use that domain to create disposable email addresses. (Chapter 9 dives much deeper into security and privacy.)
Check your inbox and open the Zoom-authentication email.
The message resembles Figure 3-2.
Open the email and click on the blue Activate Account button.
Zoom takes you to a new window or tab in your default web browser, as Figure 3-3 displays.
Complete your Zoom account by entering the required information.
Zoom requires you to enter your first and last name. What’s more, you’ll need to create and confirm your password. When you click on the password field, Zoom prompts you with guidelines about what it can and cannot contain. For example, setting your password as starwars won’t fly. Try again, young Skywalker.
Click on the orange Continue button.
The Don't Zoom Alone screen appears.
(Optional) Invite your friends, family, and/or colleagues by typing in their email addresses.
Skip this step if you like by clicking on the button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. Zoom ultimately directs you to a page that lists your personal Zoom web page or URL, such as the one that Figure 3-4 displays.
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Many people equate this term to web address, although technically speaking that’s incorrect.
Check your inbox again.
Zoom has sent you an email confirming your account and listing the features of your current plan, as Figure 3-5 displays. (Chapter 2 explains more about Zoom’s different plans.)
Congratulations. Your Zoom account is now active.
You’re now halfway home. To take advantage of the powerful features in Meetings & Chat, however, you’ll want to install its desktop client. (For instructions, see the section “Downloading and installing the Zoom desktop client,” later in this chapter.)
At some point, your business may expand, contract, or change. For example, maybe the sales folks begin to offer webinars and other customer-information sessions. Fortunately, Zoom allows its customers to easily upgrade, downgrade, cancel, and add on to their plans.
Say that you kicked the tires on Zoom’s Basic Meetings & Chat plan. You’re impressed and want to take it to the next level. Follow these directions to upgrade to the Pro plan:
Scroll down until you see the User Type section.
Zoom displays your current plan. In this example, it’s the Basic one.
Click on the orange Upgrade Account button.
A table that describes Zoom’s different plans and features appears.
Click on the button of the plan to which you want to upgrade.
In this case, it’s the Pro plan.
Select the number of meeting hosts that you want to purchase.
Zoom’s default is one. More hosts results in a larger bill.
Select the length of your subscription.
Zoom defaults to annual (with a discount), but you can easily select monthly, if that’s your preference.
(Optional) Select your desired add-ons.
For more information on these options, see Chapter 2.
Click on the blue Upgrade Now button.
Zoom displays an order summary.
Look over the summary to ensure that you’re subscribing to your desired plan and for the desired time period; if you’re happy with what you see in the summary, then click on the orange Confirm button.
Zoom displays a message confirming that you’ve upgraded your plan, as shown in Figure 3-6.
If you decide to cancel, change, or add on to your existing Meetings & Chat plan, follow these directions:
Click on Billing to display your current plans and add-ons.
Zoom displays your current plans and add-ons. Figure 3-7 displays my Zoom account dashboard.
Make your desired changes.
From the Zoom dashboard, you can
To be sure, Zoom users and customers can participate in meetings no matter where they are as long as they can connect to the Internet. Again, Meetings & Chat runs on anything: smartphone, tablet, laptop, and desktop.
Still, to take advantage of all of Zoom’s robust functionality, you’ll want to install the Zoom desktop client. Fortunately, if your computer runs MacOS, Windows, or even Ubuntu/Linux, Zoom has you covered.
To install the Zoom desktop client on your computer, follow these steps:
In the Zoom web portal, hover over the word Resources in the top right-hand corner.
A drop-down list appears.
Select Download Zoom Client from the drop-down list.
Zoom takes you to its Download Center, shown in Figure 3-8.
Click on the Download button.
Depending on your browser and how you’ve configured its settings, you may receive a warning that you’re about to download a file. If you do, then proceed.
Save this file to your computer.
The specific location is generally a matter of personal preference, but it’s wise to follow these common conventions:
Remember where you save this file.
Once the download completes, locate the file.
The specific type of file hinges upon your computer’s operating system. As of this writing, here are the filenames and extensions:
Remember where you saved this file. You’re going to need it for the next step.
Double-click on the file to launch Zoom’s installation wizard.
The exact steps that you follow depend upon your computer’s operating system. If you’ve ever installed a new program on your computer before, then you’ll recognize the steps required.
Complete the steps in the wizard.
Once you do, then the Zoom desktop client is installed. You can easily host audio and videoconferencing calls with people on any device across the globe.
After you sign up for a Zoom account and download and install the desktop client on your computer (see preceding section), you can sign in to the Zoom desktop client:
Launch the Zoom desktop client.
Zoom displays the window shown in Figure 3-9.
Note two things here: Zoom remembers who you are after you successfully log in. Second, Figure 3-9 displays an option that I have not mentioned yet: single sign-on or SSO. If you’d like to know more about it, then read the nearby sidebar “Making life simple with SSO.” For the purposes of the simple directions, however, you can ignore it.
Click on the blue Sign In button.
Zoom takes you to the main screen.
At a bare minimum, you’ll want to add a profile picture so that your colleagues and/or friends will recognize you.
To set your profile photo, follow these steps:
Click on Change, which is below the person icon next to your name.
The Change Picture window appears.
Click on the Upload button in the lower left-hand corner.
Zoom warns you that the maximum file size is 2MB.
After you create your account and install the Zoom desktop client, you can explore Zoom’s user interface (UI). Figure 3-10 displays the screen that appears when you log in to Zoom. Keep in mind that Figure 3-10 displays the UI for Zoom Meetings & Chat, not for its other offerings.
Think of the UI as a dashboard from which you can launch meetings, join existing meetings, tweak your settings, and do much more. After installing the Zoom app, the following icons and elements (from left to right) appear at the top of the screen:
The following four icons adorn the left-hand side of the screen:
I unpack these features and settings in Chapters 4 and 5. For now, suffice it to say that you’ll frequently return to the home screen of Zoom’s desktop client. In other words, you won’t just set it and forget it.
Think about your colleagues for a moment. How many of them are relatively new to your group or organization? How many have been there for a decade or more?
Zoom understands that organizations are living, breathing things. Things change. Maybe the president hires a new VP of finance and five programmers. Conversely, Travis’s bad behavior finally caught up with him, and management has shown him the door. Your cross-town rival poaches a few of your rock stars.
Fortunately, Zoom makes account management a breeze.
It’s a cinch in Zoom to create new user accounts for your employees, partners, vendors, and customers. In fact, you can add new Zoom users to your account for anyone in the world, even if those folks don’t work for your organization, by follow these steps:
On the right-hand side of the page, click on the Add Users button.
The Add Users window appears, as shown in Figure 3-11.
Select the type of user(s) that you’re adding.
Your choices are
Pay attention here. Some people have neglected to check this option only to find unexpected charges at the end of their billing cycles.
Select the features that you want to assign to the user(s).
Note that Zoom restricts you based upon your existing plan. For example, if you’re currently not paying for webinars, then Zoom forbids you from adding a user with the ability to host them. In this case, you have to subscribe to webinars as an add-on first.
Click on the blue Add button at the bottom of the screen.
Zoom displays a temporary message at the top of the screen that lets you know the user(s) have been added.
Say that John has stepped on a bunch of shattered glass and has to take a two-month medical leave. (He wasn’t wearing shoes. It’s a long story.) Here’s how you can deactivate his Zoom account.
On the right-hand side of the page, click on the three horizontal dots that correspond to his name.
Zoom displays three options:
Choose Deactivate from the menu that appears.
Zoom asks you to confirm the deactivation. The user will no longer be able to access any Zoom service.
Sometimes deactivating an employee’s user account is insufficient. Perhaps an employee did something unconscionable, such as stole company secrets. Maybe an employee passed away.
In either case, you want to permanently eliminate the person’s Zoom account. Follow these steps:
Choose Delete.
Zoom displays a window asking whether you want to transfer the data associated with the current user’s account. This step is optional, but your choices are
Select your desired data transfer options by selecting the appropriate checkboxes, entering an email address when prompted.
Zoom assigns all of the current user’s data to the account associated with the email address that you enter here.
If you selected data transfer options in the preceding step, then click on the Transfer Data, Then Delete button; otherwise, click on the Delete Now Without Data Transfer button.
Either way, you need to click on a red button to proceed with the account deletion. Zoom displays a message at the top of the screen indicating that it has processed the account deletion. That account no longer appears in the list of users.
This step is permanent. There is no CTRL+Z.
Zoom offers one final option for managing accounts, one slightly less draconian than deletion. By unlinking an account from the mother organization, the account continues to exist — just under a different, unaffiliated email address. Think of it as a divorce.
Follow these steps to remove a user account from your organization in Zoom:
Choose Unlink.
Zoom displays a window asking whether you want to transfer the data associated with the current user’s account. This step is optional, but your choices are
Select your desired data transfer options by selecting the appropriate checkboxes, entering an email address when prompted.
Zoom assigns all of the current user’s data to the account associated with the email address that you enter here.
If you selected data transfer options in the preceding step, then click on the Transfer Data, Then Unlink button; otherwise, click on the Unlink Now Without Data Transfer button.
Either way, you need to click on a red button to proceed to unlink the account.
Note that the email address must correspond to an active and existing Zoom account in your organization.
Zoom displays a message at the top of the screen indicating that it has unlinked the account. That user account no longer appears in your Zoom web portal.
Zoom offers customers on premium plans a particularly valuable and timesaving feature: user groups. At a high level, user groups grant admins and owners the ability to manage user settings at the group level. In other words, they can concurrently change or lock the settings for multiple users. If that seems a bit abstract, then consider one of the many potential applications of user groups.
The fictitious Octavarium University has subscribed to Zoom’s Education plan for years. To build camaraderie and minimize misunderstandings, the school encourages its employees to enable their video when holding remote meetings. (See Chapter 4 for more information on this subject.)
At the same time, its administrators are justifiably concerned about student privacy, especially during the pandemic. They want to ensure that students don’t join their professors’ Zoom meetings with their video automatically enabled. In other words, undergraduates can activate their webcams if they want, but the choice should ultimately be theirs to make.
Jordan is Octavarium’s Zoom admin. To make this change for all university professors, he follows this three-step process:
You first create a specific Zoom user group for professors by following these directions:
From the prompt, enter the name of the user group.
In this case, he calls it Professors.
Click on the blue Add button.
Zoom displays a brief message in green at the top of the screen that the group is created.
Jordan has created a new user group, but by itself it is useless. In order to customize users’ settings, he needs to place existing Zoom members into these groups — specifically, all of Octavarium’s college professors.
You can populate a user group by following these directions:
On the right-hand side of the page, click on the name of the group to which you want to add members.
In this case, it’s the Professors user group.
Click on the blue Add button.
Zoom confirms that you successfully added the group members.
Now that Jordan has both created the user group and added professors to it, he can now apply a specific change to all Octavarium professors in one fell swoop. At a high level, Zoom’s options fall into three buckets:
Jordan is almost finished. He wants to allow group members to join meetings without enabling video:
Find the setting that you’d like to tweak for this group.
In this example, Jordan wants to ensure that students can join meetings without enabling their video.
Next to Participants video, slide the blue toggle button left.
It turns gray, indicating that it’s now off.
Zoom displays a brief message in green at the top of the screen that confirms that the settings have been updated.
As an added safety measure, click on the gray lock icon to the right of the toggle button so that no one can override this setting.
Zoom displays the same confirmation message at the top of the screen. Voilà! Now Octavarium students can join Zoom meetings with their professors via audio only if they desire.
I have just scratched the surface on what user groups can do. Chapter 9 covers this meaty topic in the context of Zoom’s privacy and security settings, many of which owners and admins can easily apply via user groups.
Zoom relies heavily upon user roles. In this way, Zoom resembles most powerful systems and applications. The basic premise behind roles is straightforward: In any organizations, users’ needs and responsibilities will differ. As such, they require the ability to perform certain actions. Just as important, certain users should not be able to do specific things. It’s not hard to imagine the chaos that would result if everyone in Zoom could perform every task.
Zoom ships with three default user roles:
If the roles of owner, admin, and member seem a skosh confining to you, then you’re in luck. Say that you want to create a new role specifically for Roger, the head of marketing. Roger frequently hosts webinars for prospective customers. As a result, he needs to be able to do a few things that regular members can’t. At the same time, though, you don’t want to give him the keys to the kingdom.
Zoom lets admins and owners create new roles as needed. Just follow these steps:
Click on Role Management to see the current roles in your organization.
By default, they are owner, admin, and member.
Click on the blue Add button.
Zoom displays a boatload of options.
Select the specific options that you want to grant to the new role.
At a high level, Zoom lets you determine what the people in the role will be able to do. Options include
When you finish, click on the blue Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.
Zoom displays a temporary message in green at the top of the screen that confirms that your settings have been updated.
Your custom role is created, but it’s not assigned to anyone in your organization.
Employees and companies part ways. New hires come aboard. People transfer from one part of the company to another. Don’t worry, though. Zoom recognizes that things change.
To assign someone in your organization a new Zoom role, follow these steps:
Click on the Edit button next to the name of the person whose role you want to change.
Zoom displays a new window that allows you to edit the user’s information.
Click on the blue Save button.
Zoom displays a temporary message in green at the top of the screen to confirm that you successfully changed the user’s role.
For much more about Zoom roles, see bit.ly/zmroles
.