Rooms & Workspaces How-to Zoom Workplace

Get More Control in Your Zoom Rooms, Get More Interactive in Meetings with New Zoom Releases

The Zoom team delivered another feature-packed release last weekend based on your customer input. Here's what new in Zoom Rooms, Zoom Meetings & Zoom Phone!

4 min read

Updated on September 23, 2022

Published on December 18, 2019

In this blog

01 Zoom Rooms - Jumplink to Zoom Rooms
02 Zoom Meetings - Jumplink to Zoom Meetings
03 Zoom Phone - Jumplink to Zoom Phone

Janelle Raney

Head of Product Marketing

The Zoom engineers have been busy delivering new feature happiness this December! Following our Dec. 2 release, the team delivered another feature-packed release this past weekend based on your customer input. The pace of innovation with over 300 new features released this year is truly amazing! Here are a few of the coolest new features for Zoom Rooms, Zoom Meetings, and Zoom Phone:

Native Room Control Integration

Zoom Rooms’ native room control integration enables users to control IP-addressable devices, such as lighting, shades, air conditioning, and more, straight from the Zoom Rooms Controller. You can view this Zoomtopia session with our own JayJay Kim, Zoom Solution Architect, explaining how this works.

Virtual Background with Green Screen for Zoom Rooms

Zoom Rooms can now support virtual backgrounds with a green screen. Ideal for studios, webinars, broadcasts, and presentations, admins can upload backgrounds on the Zoom Rooms web portal and in-room participants can select their preferred background (or none at all) from the Zoom Rooms controller during a meeting.

Waiting Rooms

Waiting Rooms are virtual staging areas that prevent people from joining a meeting until the host is ready. Zoom Rooms users can now use waiting rooms as a host or as a participant and can further customize settings to control which participants can join when.

Digital Signage Split Screen Layout and Weather Display

Digital Signage admins can choose different split-screen content layouts and select the content shown in each section. They'll also have the ability to display local weather.

Companion Whiteboard

Companion whiteboard allows customers to deploy an additional Zoom Rooms for Touch device to an existing Zoom Room, enabling in-room and remote participants to whiteboard, co-annotate, and collaborate. Replace your analog whiteboards and enhance existing spaces without any additional licenses or expensive makeovers — all you need is a touch display and a Windows OS. Zoom Rooms for Touch users also can save a multi-page whiteboard as a PDF.

Advanced Call Support

Transfer Zoom Phone Call: Transfer active Zoom Phone calls from a Zoom Room to another user.
Zoom Phone 3-Way Calling: Users can have multiple active calls simultaneously in a Zoom Room and merge the calls when desired.
Convert Zoom Phone Call to Zoom Meeting: Elevate your Zoom Phone call to a video meeting in a Zoom Room.

Device Profiles for Zoom Rooms

Admins can create specific device profiles for different types of meetings. Device profiles can be configured for specific display settings, cameras, speakers, microphones, and screen layouts. Once created, these profiles can be selected via the Zoom Room Controller.

Support for Multiple Room Controllers, Scheduling Displays

Zoom Rooms will be able to support multiple room controllers to help provide a better room control experience for larger spaces and settings. These controllers will be mirrored, providing completely synced UIs. You’ll also be able to mount multiple Scheduling Displays outside your larger spaces and rooms with multiple entrances to further simplify booking.

Meeting Reactions

Meeting participants can now send a thumbs up or clapping icon to show engagement and give encouragement without interrupting the meeting. Reactions show up right on the video and will disappear after 5 seconds.

View Another Participant’s Audio Status

Now it’s super easy to know if someone has connected to audio when they join a meeting. In both gallery view and speaker view, Zoom will display “Connecting Audio” below a participant’s video until that participant has joined the audio, making it clear when they can hear you.

Virtual Background Selection within Video Preview

The video preview now has an option to select or change your virtual background before you join the meeting.

Talkdesk Contact Center Integration

This native, out-of-the-box integration allows customers to integrate TalkDesk cloud contact center to Zoom Phone. Calls between the Zoom cloud and Talkdesk are directly routed over a private network peering connection for improved quality and automatic call routing capabilities. For the full list of new features, check out the release notes for Mac OSx, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux platforms, and follow these instructions to get on the latest Zoom version. For additional information, sign up for a customized 1-on-1 demo with a Zoom product specialist today.