In today’s “Ask Me Anything with Eric Yuan & Zoom Leadership” webinar hosted by Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan, we provided an update on our progress since our last executive webinar on July 15. Today, our team covered our recent global expansion of Zoom Phone, new devices coming to Zoom for Home, an update on our end-to-end encryption offering, and tips for educators to secure their Zoom Meetings as the new school year starts.

Eric was joined on today’s webinar by Oded Gal, our Chief Product Officer, to review recent and upcoming product updates to the Zoom platform, Janelle Raney, Head of Product Marketing, Max Krohn, Head of Security Engineering, and Jason Lee, our Chief Information Security Officer.

Product Security Updates in August 

August 2nd product updates:

• Zoom Meetings & Webinars 
  • Passcode and Waiting Room options at the top of all of schedulers 
  • Improved Waiting Room notifications
  • Consent to unmute phone participants

• Zoom Team Chat 
  • Manage posting permissions
  • Option to control ability for external contacts to add new users to a channel or group chat

August 16th product updates: 

• Zoom Phone
  • Enhanced roles and permissions
  • Emergency calling enhancements
  • Sync with IDP for corporate directory contacts

• Zoom Meetings
  • Display certificate expiration date on single sign-on page (web service only)
  • Consent for participant unmute
  • External authentication

August 23rd planned product updates:

• Zoom Team Chat 
  • Account admin able to manage account’s external contacts 
  • Account admin able to download chat history for a specific user for one year at a time

Zoom Phone service expansion

On August 17th, we announced that we expanded Zoom Phone service to 25 additional countries and territories. We also launched the Global Select plan, which allows you to purchase domestic calling for one flat price per user in the 40-plus countries and territories where we provide our cloud phone service.

Zoom for Home on your smart display

Last month we launched Zoom for Home as a way to more easily video-enable your home offices. Today, we announced that we will be expanding Zoom for Home to include personal smart displays from Amazon, Facebook, and Google for reliable communication and collaboration using devices you may already own.

End-to-end encryption update

Zoom Head of Security Engineering, Max Krohn, provided an update on our end-to-end encryption offering since the release of the private beta on July 31. Max reiterated our goal of maintaining Zoom’s ease of use and frictionless deployment while providing this new key management methodology. We are evaluating feedback from our beta test program and are working towards general availability this fall. 

Tips for securing your Zoom Meetings

With our educators and students heading back to school, Chief Information Security Officer Jason Lee provided a review of useful features you can use to secure your meetings. Jason urged users to leverage the pre-meeting settings in the Zoom portal to ensure meetings are secure from the outset, including enabling Waiting Rooms, Passcodes, and the Join by Domain feature.

Jason also reviewed in-meeting controls that hosts can use to secure their meetings, including:

• Lock the meeting so no new participants can join even if they have the meeting ID and passcode
• Remove uninvited participants
• Put a participant on hold to mute their audio and video
• Turn a participant’s video off
• Mute individual participants or all of them at once
• Disable in-meeting file transfer through chat
• Disable the annotation feature
• Restrict participants’ ability to chat
• Turn off screen sharing for participants
• Enable/disable ability for a participant or all participants to record
• Disable participants’ ability to rename their onscreen identity
• Turn on Waiting Room from within the meeting
• Report disruptive users to Zoom’s Trust & Safety team, who will review any potential misuse of the platform and take appropriate action

Q&A

What advice do you have for businesses that are looking to go completely remote? 

Eric explained that companies looking to go completely remote must have the technology and the tools to make that transition seamless. He also stressed the importance of engaging with employees to connect with them and ensure they maintain their mental health while working remotely. Janelle gave the example of her team doing optional half-hour daily stand-ups for the past few months. 

What is Zoom doing to empower teachers and students for remote learning? 

Eric emphasized that we will be doubling down on our efforts in education by sharing best practices, investing more time and attention in the education space, and continuing to work to protect meetings and education sessions from bad actors. He cited our recent free two-day Zoom Summer Academy for teachers as an example. 

What hardware do you recommend for enabling teachers from home? 

Recent model computers with adequate CPU will be acceptable for educators teaching from home (learn about our system requirements). Oded also recommended devices to help with lessons and presentations – check out the recommended hardware for hybrid classrooms and for teaching from home. 

How is Zoom ensuring its quality of service with so many new users?

Eric said that we are comfortable with our capacity as our architecture and co-located data centers are designed for uptime, reliability, and to ensure we can provide high-quality audio and video.  

Can you use a virtual background without a green screen?

Virtual backgrounds can work without a green screen on computers with adequate CPU (learn virtual background system requirements). However, using a physical green screen will create a virtual background with higher fidelity and performance. 

What is your vision of the future as people return to office? 

Eric explained that businesses need to make sure they have the technology infrastructure in place to create an effective hybrid environment for those who can and cannot return to the office immediately. Larger, open office layouts may not be as desirable, and supporting smaller technology hubs with fewer employees in each space may be a better approach.  

Thank you!

Thanks for attending this month’s session, and thank you to everyone who submitted questions! We truly appreciate your support on our journey to make Zoom the world’s most secure enterprise communications platform.

If you missed this week’s session, you can watch the recording here: