Manage Participants

Manage participants

There are a number of features in Zoom which allow you to manage and interact with participants during a meeting. This guide will highlight some of the options you may want to consider utilising, depending on the number of attendees and the type of session you are planning.

Waiting room

The waiting room can be used to prevent participants from enter the main meeting room before the host is ready for the session to begin. This can be useful if you need to set up a presentation or test your audio and video settings before participants join. You can also use this feature to ensure that only the intended participants are admitted into the meeting. See more information on enabling the Waiting Room on our scheduling guide.

When the waiting room is enabled, you will receive a notification when participants are waiting to join the meeting. You can view and manage the waiting room using the Participants panel.

From this panel you can Message those in the waiting room, Admit specific participants, or Admit all participants into the meeting.

Once you are ready to start the meeting, you can also disable the waiting room entirely using the More menu at the bottom of the Participants panel. This is useful if you do not want to manually admit any participants who may join the meeting late.

Grant access or revoke features

Using the Participants panel, you can promote participants to a higher role if you want to grant them additional access to meeting controls and features. Hover your cursor over the participant’s name and click More to either make the user the meeting Host or a Co-Host.

Please note: a meeting can have multiple Co-Hosts, but only one Host. If you make another user the Host, you will lose your own Host role in the meeting.

You can also revoke certain features from participants in a meeting. Manage participant features by clicking the Security button at the bottom of the window. From this menu you can choose whether participants can share their screen, use the Chat, rename themselves, unmute their microphones, or enable their cameras. This can be adjusted at any time during the meeting.

Muting and requesting participants mute

During a meeting, it may be useful to mute all participants quickly. This can be done by clicking Mute All at the bottom of the Participants panel.

You can also request a participant unmute their microphone. This can be done by highlighting a participant’s name in meeting gallery or by moving your cursor over the participant’s name in the Participant panel and selecting Ask to Unmute.

Arrange view and active speaker

Depending on the number of participants and whether they are sharing their cameras, you may want to customise how the Zoom interface is displayed on your screen. Using the View button in the top-right corner of the window, you can select Speaker view (switching between active speakers), Gallery view (displaying up to 25 participants), and Fullscreen. This only changes the interface for yourself, not other participants in the meeting.

Example of Active Speaker view. The active speaker’s profile is moved into the larger area, with participants listed across the top of the window.

Example of the gallery view. The active speaker’s profile is highlighted in yellow when talking.

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