If you have an incident during a Zoom meeting that requires an unwanted participant to be removed, please contact the IT Help Desk immediately by calling 816-584-6768 to report the situation.


These are the best practices for securing Zoom meetings when you are scheduling a meeting, as well as what you can do during a meeting should an incident occur that requires action.


Zoom Meeting Invitation URL Links should *never*, under any circumstances, be posted or shared on any type of social media.  Zoom Meeting Invitation URL Links should be kept private and not posted/shared publicly in any manner.


Pre-Meeting Settings


With meeting settings in the Zoom web portal and the Zoom application, securing your Zoom Meetings can start before your event even begins.


  • Don't User Personal Meeting ID for Public Meetings:  Your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) is the default meeting that launches when you start an ad hoc meeting.  Your PMI doesn't change unless you change it yourself, which makes it very useful if people need a way to reach you.  But for public meetings, you should always schedule new meetings with randomly generated meeting IDs.  That way, only invited attendees will know how to join your meeting.  You can also turn off your PMI when starting an instant meeting in your profile settings.
  • Require a Passcode to Join:  You can take meeting security even further by requiring a passcode to join your meetings. This feature can be applied to both your Personal Meeting ID, so only those with the passcode will be able to reach you, and to newly scheduled meetings. To learn all the ways to add a passcode for your meetings, please view this support article.
  • Only Allow Registered Users:  Zoom can also give you peace of mind by letting you know exactly who will be attending your meeting.  When scheduling a meeting, select the option to Only Authenticated Users Can Join Meetings and this will require users to be logged into Zoom rather than being a "Guest" or "Anonymous".
  • Waiting Room: One of the best ways to secure your meetings is to turn on Zoom's Waiting Room feature. This feature provides a virtual waiting room for your attendees and allows you to admit individual meeting participants into your meeting at your discretion.  Learn more about Using Waiting Rooms here.


In-Meeting Settings


Once your Zoom Meeting is off and running you'll have access to a number of helpful features that put you in total control.

  • Master the Security Menu:  Zoom now puts all your essential security options in a single button, right in the in-meeting menu.  Under this menu you'll be able to lock your meeting and prevent any new participants from joining.  You'll also be able to enable Waiting Room to help manage new meeting participants and be able to control any sharing and chat permissions of individuals and all attendees.
    • Lock the Meeting:  Once all your attendees have arrived, you can easily lock your meeting from the security menu, preventing any additional attendees from joining.
    • Enable Waiting Room:  We've covered the Waiting Room in great detail already, but what if you forgot to activate it or want to turn it on mid-meeting?  Now you can!

  • Control Screen Sharing:  Allowing participants to screen share in a meeting can be a great way to collaborate, but that can also leave you open to unwanted interruptions during larger meetings.  Zoom gives you the ability to determine if you want other participants in the meeting to be able to share their screens, or if you want to be the only one with that ability.  You can easily toggle this feature on and off from the screen sharing menu, as well as the security menu.

  • Disable Private Chat:  In-meeting chat adds another dimension of collaboration to your meetings, creating a place for questions to be asked and fielded later, or for supplemental resources to be posted.  But sometimes chat can become distracting or unproductive.  In those cases, Zoom allows you to disable and enable chat throughout your meeting.


  • Turn Off Annotation:  Like screen sharing and in-meeting chat, annotation can be a great tool when you need it, but it can also be an opportunity for mischief when you don't.  To avoid unwanted annotation, Zoom allows you as the meeting host to remove all participants' ability to annotate during a screen share.  You can disable this for the entire meeting, or just temporarily.  
  • Mute Participants:  We've all been in meetings where somebody forgets to mute, or their microphone picks up some background noise that interrupts the meeting.  Zoom allows you to solve this problem with a simple button to mute all participants.  For an added layer of security, you can also disable participant's ability to unmute themselves.  When you're ready to make the meeting interactive again, you can simply hit the "Unmute All" button or allow participants to unmute themselves.

  • Make Someone a Co-Host:  All the features we've covered so far are only accessible to meeting hosts, ensuring that hosts are the only ones with total control over a meeting.  But what if you need a helping hand to manage all your participants?  You can promote a trusted meeting attendee to Co=Host, allowing them many of the same privileges and control features available to the meeting host themselves.  To learn about the difference between a host and co-host, view this support article.
  • Remove Participants:  If you follow all the best practices in this guide, you should never find yourself in a meeting with an unwanted guest.  But if you do need to remove an attendee from the meeting at any point, Zoom makes it easy to kick an wanted participant out of the meeting.  For additional security, you can also choose to not allow participants to rejoin once they've been removed.


If you have an incident during a Zoom meeting that requires an unwanted participant to be removed, please contact the IT Help Desk immediately by calling 816-584-6768 to report the situation.