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Secure Your Meetings with Zoom Waiting Rooms

Zoom Waiting Rooms are a great meeting feature because they protect who joins your meetings without participants having to enter a password.

5 min read

Updated on February 07, 2024

Published on February 14, 2020

Zoom Waiting Rooms and a secure video conference

In this blog

01 Waiting Rooms for your Personal Meeting ID - Jumplink to Waiting Rooms for your Personal Meeting ID
02 Waiting Rooms for groups - Jumplink to Waiting Rooms for groups
03 Waiting Rooms during a meeting - Jumplink to Waiting Rooms during a meeting
04 Customize the Waiting Room - Jumplink to Customize the Waiting Room
05 Learn more - Jumplink to Learn more

Deepthi Jayarajan

Senior Product Manager

Zoom’s video communications platform provides you with numerous secure video conference features to ensure your meetings are protected and include only the desired participants. One of the most popular security components of Zoom Meetings is the Waiting Rooms feature. The Waiting Room is just like it sounds: It’s a virtual staging area that prevents people from joining a meeting until the host is ready. Meeting hosts can customize the Waiting Room settings to gain further control over which participants join a specific meeting and when. When it comes to video conferencing security best practices, Waiting Rooms are extremely useful for protecting meetings that have external participants, including when:

HR departments or hiring managers conduct numerous first-round video interviews
Business professionals use their Personal Meeting ID (PMI) for all their meetings

Waiting Rooms are especially beneficial for securing meetings that use your PMI because they provide added visibility into who’s trying to join. (More on that below!) Zoom Rooms also support the Waiting Rooms feature. As a meeting host, you can customize the title, logo, and message that appear in the Waiting Room, which lets waiting participants know they are in the right place. You can even send a personalized message to those in the Waiting Room, either to individual users on desktop and mobile or to all Waiting Room attendees. So how do you capitalize on all these capabilities? By enabling Waiting Rooms in your Zoom account:

Sign in to your account in the Zoom Web Portal and access the Settings tab.
Click on the In Meeting (Advanced) option.
Search or scroll to find the Waiting Room option.
Toggle the button next to the Waiting Room to enable this feature.
After enabling the Waiting Room feature, you can choose to send all participants to the Waiting Room when they join or to send only guest participants (external accounts) to the Waiting Room. You can also allow other internal participants to admit guests from the Waiting Room if the host is not yet in the meeting.

Enable Waiting Rooms Now, when you schedule a meeting, the Waiting Room is enabled for all future meetings. Waiting Rooms - Schedule Meeting Pretty cool, right? Here are a few other ways to secure your meetings using the Zoom Waiting Room:

The Waiting Room feature is a great way to secure your Personal Meeting ID. Your PMI is essentially a meeting that’s always running, and if someone has your meeting ID they can just type it in and try to join. You can secure your personal meeting room by requiring a password to join, but the Waiting Room gives you that security plus added visibility into who is trying to join. It provides a layer of security without adding friction for authorized invitees, who wouldn’t have to enter a password every time to join. Learn how to enable Waiting Rooms for your Personal Meeting ID, which activates the Waiting Room for every meeting you set using your PMI.

Zoom allows you to be even more specific about which participants are allowed into the meeting and which participants will go to the Waiting Room. If you have administrative privileges on your account, you can choose to enable the Waiting Room feature for specific groups of people, such as those using a certain domain name or employees in a specific department. This gives the meeting host the ability to control the flow of participants — and information — in a meeting. Learn how to enable the Waiting Room for groups.

You also can use the Waiting Room feature during a meeting, which allows the host to put participants into a Waiting Room on the fly. This is a great feature because you can control when people join your meeting. For instance, the host can send specific attendees back into the Waiting Room if they are signed-in internal participants that were not put in the Waiting Room initially or if the host accidentally admitted someone and needs to send them back out.

Learn how to use Waiting Rooms during a meeting.

When you enable the Waiting Room feature, you can add a title, logo, and text to the Waiting Room message that meeting participants see while they’re waiting, which is great for logistical reasons. Learn how to customize your Waiting Room.

The Waiting Room feature is just one of the many ways Zoom helps protect your meetings. To learn more tips for securing your Zoom meetings, check out the “Top Ways Zoom Hosts & Admins Can Ensure a Secure Meeting Experience” blog. Or schedule a personalized demo with a Zoom product specialist today!

Editor's note: This blog was originally published in February 2020 and was updated in February 2024 with the most current information on waiting room features.