New From Zoom: Spring Forward with Zoom Whiteboard, Gesture Recognition, Zoom Revenue Accelerator, and More!

Spring is here, and as greener grasses approach, we’re releasing some fresh features and products to put some ‘spring’ into your communications as well! In this update, we’ve provided a range of features to help you and your teams enhance, protect, and streamline your collaboration, including Gesture Recognition, Zoom Revenue Accelerator, Zoom Whiteboard, Backstage for Zoom Events, and more. 

Here are some of the highlights from our recent update: 

Zoom Revenue Accelerator  

Help your sales teams reach their full potential with Zoom Revenue Accelerator, a conversation AI solution that analyzes customer interactions to surface key insights, actions, and content from sales meetings. Be sure to check out our blog for more information!

Gesture Recognition

Easily share how you’re feeling with others and encourage seamless engagement with Gesture Recognition, which allows for visual gestures, such as a raised hand, to automatically display a corresponding meeting reaction. This feature currently supports Raise Hand and Thumbs Up reactions and requires client version 5.10.3 or higher, and can be enabled at the account and group levels. This setting is disabled at the client level by default.

Zoom Whiteboard

We’ve completely rebuilt our whiteboard experience to bring you the all-new Zoom Whiteboard, a cross-platform, persistent, online, visual collaboration solution that’s built right into the Zoom desktop client, Zoom Meetings, and Zoom Rooms for Touch devices. Take your collaboration to the next level with features like; shapes, connectors, sticky notes, adding images, and more. Check out our blog or Zoom Whiteboard page for more information on Zoom Whiteboard!

Audio Conferencing quality enhancements

Updates to our Asia Pacific data centers now allow users in the APAC region to enjoy an even higher quality audio conferencing experience. Zoom’s new APAC region offers better audio quality and reduced audio delays for meeting callers. Upon selecting Asia, new DID and Tollfree numbers around the world will be available in your Meeting invite for customers to dial into. Similarly, Call-Me outcalls to global destinations will originate directly from Zoom APAC data centers to minimize all network and carrier delays.

View Breakout Room activities from main session

Enhance the management of your breakout sessions and see how your participants are engaging with each other with the ability to view the activity in breakout rooms from the main session. With this feature, hosts can easily see participants’ audio and video status, whether they are sharing their screen, and more. Once enabled, participants are notified when they join the breakout room that their activity status is shared with the host and any co-hosts. 

Central library of polls 

To empower our users to more easily prepare and manage their polls, you can now manage a central library of polls for meetings. You can also create or edit polls and use them for Personal Meeting ID (PMI) and non-PMI meetings, creating a central location where you can manage all of your polls. When a poll is marked as available to all meetings, it will appear in the list of polls that can be launched in a meeting. 

One-time password requirement for suspicious logins

Protecting the security of our customers is a priority for Zoom, which is why we’re now requiring users with a work email login who do not have two-factor authentication to enter a one-time password when Zoom detects a suspicious login, such as a login from a different country or from a different device than usual.

Disable in-meeting/webinar chat notifications

When the in-meeting/webinar chat becomes very active, the constant barrage of chat notifications that appear on screen can become distracting from the content of the meeting. This features enables users to turn off or turn on in-meeting/webinar chat notifications on demand.

Support for multi-spotlight for cloud recordings 

Empower your teams to create dynamic cloud recordings that capture important context with support for multi-spotlight for cloud recordings. Cloud recordings will recognize and record up to 9 spotlighted participants in a meeting or webinar, allowing teams to create more effective training materials and engaging marketing content. 

Backstage 

Capture the look and feel of an in-person event with Backstage, providing a persistent space for event panelists and staff to communicate behind the scenes before, during, and after a Zoom Events webinar session.

Enhancements for Expo maximum capacity 

We’re providing some exciting enhancements to the Expo floor for Zoom Events to help you scale your hybrid or virtual event and create an unrivaled networking experience, including the ability to host up to 1,500 concurrent users. Here some of the other enhancements we’ve made to the Expo floor:  

• 100 sponsored booths and 200 non-sponsored booths for total of up to 300 maximum total Expo booths per event
• 20 maximum sponsor representatives per sponsor and 20 maximum booth representatives per booth owner

Webinar Reactions

Keep the engagement flowing during your webinars and events with Webinar Reactions, which allow attendees to react with an emoji in real time during a Zoom webinar. 

Session Branding

Create a coordinated and professional atmosphere for your events by customizing the look and feel of your webinar with Session Branding, allowing event hosts to upload branded wallpaper, create custom name tags for panelists, and more! 

General availability of Chat and SMS

You can now further diversify and manage how you handle inbound chat and SMS messages with the ability to create or edit chat and SMS channel flows, providing teams with greater flexibility in how they route these messages.

Engagement dashboard enhancements

Admins can now use the contact center analytics dashboard to view real-time metrics on video engagements and view associated engagement events to gain critical insights in their team’s performance in real time. We’ve also enhanced the accuracy of engagements metrics for engagements that go through multiple queues, and enabled team leaders to gain more context regarding voice and video events in an exportable engagement log. 

Add video to Waiting Room

Create a seamless and engaging customer experience with the Add video to Waiting Room feature, which enables account owners and admins to upload a video to display to customers in the Waiting Room.

Automatic voice call recording

Simplify the management of your automatic call recordings with the ability to enable or disable automatic call recording for outbound or inbound voice calls. You can also playback recordings using the engagement log to help enhance training efforts and review sessions.

Voicemail transcription

Account owners and admins can now view voicemail transcriptions when viewing inbox messages, providing a seamless and streamlined way to quickly review messages and get to the crux of the issue.

Chat Etiquette Tool 

Help create a safe and respectful group chat experience with the Chat Etiquette Tool. This feature enables admins to create policies that the Chat Etiquette Tool uses to identify defined keywords, text patterns, and regular expressions (such as account numbers) and then determine what action occurs when a policy is triggered. For example, when a user attempts to send a message through Zoom Team Chat and/or in-meeting/webinar chat that triggers a Chat Etiquette policy, the user is either warned or blocked from sending the message. 

Box and Microsoft Sharepoint integrations

Empower teams to save time and simplify workflows with the Box and Microsoft SharePoint integrations for Zoom Team Chat, which provides teams the ability to upload, share, access, and manage files for these storage solutions right from Zoom Team Chat.

Default carrier change for BYOC emergency calls
To help enhance our customer’s safety and the reliability of their emergency calls, new customers utilizing Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) will automatically use Zoom as the emergency carrier for calls placed from US and Canada BYOC numbers. Customers can either opt-in immediately, contact Zoom to be exempted from this change, or can simply wait for the change to take effect automatically in May. 

SMS/MMS opt in/out

Users can allow their recipients to opt in/out of SMS/MMS messaging to provide a better experience and help stay within the 10DLC parameters set by mobile carriers.

Device Dashboard 

Admins now have an at-a-glance view of phones and devices in a dashboard. This enables them to easily view online/offline status, phone assignment, the percentage of users using hardware devices across the organization, HaaS (Hardware as a service) device breakdown, a global heat map, and more!

For more information on upcoming feature releases, check out our release notes.

Editor’s note 4/21/2022 - We’ve updated the description of Gesture Recognition to reflect how it can be enabled.