Zoom is improving the collaborative experience by expanding capabilities in Chat and Meetings – and adding new features to Zoom Rooms.
Last week, Zoom announced a host of new capabilities set to reduce friction when collaborating, and empower users to personalize their engagement experiences on its videoconferencing platform.
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Zoom Chat
Zoom Chat is getting three updates, as part of the platform’s efforts to streamline workflows, reduce friction in collaborating, and personalize experiences.
The first of these enhances rich text formatting. Messaging now includes options like bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, highlight, text color, font size, bulleted and numbered lists, hyperlinks, and indenting.
The second customizes personal notes, which can now be configured to display for a specific period of time. In addition to its time duration, personal notes can now also be made to appear above the text input box when someone is composing a message to you. This capability allows you to inform colleagues of your current unavailability.
Finally, Zoom is updating its Zoom Chat with the ability for users to quote specific messages sent in a channel. This should help to avoid confusion, for example, when an initial question has been buried in a long conversation.
Zoom Meetings
Zoom Meetings are also receiving a good update with the release of three new features. The improvements optimize the users’ personal experience, before, during, and after, the meeting.
Hosts who have integrated their Google or Outlook calendars will now be able to see the list of invited participants who have not yet shown up to the meeting.
Furthermore, Zoom is enhancing the way hosts can overview security settings in meetings. It allows them to quickly check what security features are currently in effect for the meeting they are hosting via the in-meeting encryption shield, located in the top-left corner of the meeting.
Finally, Zoom has aligned separate audio tracks for local recordings. When recording separate audio tracks for a local recording during a meeting, the audio tracks will be aligned, in that each track is in sync with each other and start at the same point.
Zoom Rooms
Zoom Rooms is getting three updates that improve the collaborative experience of both in-person and remote attendees.
Users will have full capabilities to start, set up, and control breakout rooms; and even the ability to assign participants to rooms and edit their breakout rooms directly from the controller.
In addition, the Zoom Room experience is being upgraded with Focus Mode, a feature released in August to support placing meeting participants in a view where they are only able to see themselves, the host/co-hosts, and the content they are sharing. Zoom Rooms can also support managing Focus Mode.
Finally, Zoom is adding support for Poly Studio X70 in Rooms. With the new hardware partnership, Poly Studio X70 is now shipping as a Zoom Rooms Appliance for users looking to video-enable larger meeting spaces.