Zoom 101: Scheduling Your Zoom Meetings

We designed Zoom for on-the-fly, fast collaboration. See the image on the right? Just click either of the top two orange buttons on your Zoom client and you’re in a meeting. Or start an instant meeting from our messenger by clicking the “Start a Meeting” drop down in the chat window. What a snap! But let’s say you want to be a bit more organized - ad hoc just isn’t your thing. Well, let's talk scheduling…

Open your Zoom application and log in. Then click on the Schedule icon – it’s blue and says “Schedule,” you can’t miss it. Then fill out the scheduler with the options below. Many of these you can set to a default in your Account Settings at zoom.us and never worry about again, but you can also change them in your scheduler as needed. (You can also schedule your meetings through the web at zoom.us/meeting/schedule.)

• Topic: Choose a topic/name for your meeting.
• When: Select a date and time of your meeting. Note that scheduled meetings can be started by the host at anytime, regardless of the date and time settings.
• Timezone: By default, Zoom will use your computer’s time zone setting. To change the time zone, click this dropdown.
• Recurring meeting: Choose if you would like a recurring meeting. This is useful if you’re having a regular meeting, such as a weekly All Hands, and want the meeting ID to always be the same.
• Schedule For: This only shows up if you've been enabled to schedule for another person. Choose if you’re scheduling the meeting for yourself or for someone else (this is helpful tool for admins and assistants).
• Video (when joining meeting): Default the video to on or off for the host and participants. Audio Options: Choose whether to allow users to call in via Telephone, VoIP, both, or a 3rd party audio provider.
• Password: If you want, you can input a password here. Joining participants will be required to enter the password before joining the meeting.
• Enable join before host: Allow participants to join your meeting before you.
• Use Personal Meeting ID: The ID for this meeting will be your Personal Meeting ID (see below for more info).
• Calendar: Add to any integrated calendar (Google, Outlook, iCal) and send out email invites to participants.

Then click the Schedule button to finish. The scheduler will then automatically launch your calendaring tool (such as Outlook or Gmail) with the meeting open as a calendar event, or you can manually launch any calendar and paste the scheduling info. Then you invite others to join via your calendaring tool or email, as you would any other meeting.

Now, scheduling is certainly easy, but if we’re honest, the one-two step of opening the scheduler and then launching your calendaring system is just the tiniest bit cumbersome. That’s why we created plugins for your Google and Outlook calendaring systems. These plugins allow you to schedule entirely from Google or Outlook, with the simple push of a button to make any scheduled appointment into a Zoom meeting. Download them here!

We give our users the ability to schedule virtual meetings with a static ID that will never expire. Paid users can even customize this meeting ID to an easy-to-remember set of numbers, such as their phone number (more info on this). You can find your PMI by clicking Meetings on your Zoom client. The top meeting is your PMI. You can instantly start your PMI meeting here by pressing Start. Or you can also select the option “Always use PMI for instant meetings on this computer,” so that whenever you start an instant meeting from the Zoom home screen you will be in your PMI meeting. You can also schedule a meeting with your PMI by choosing the option to “Use Personal Meeting ID” on the scheduler as discussed above. To start having your scheduled and instant Zoom meetings today, sign up for a live demo with a Zoom product specialist!