New From Zoom: Start Using Focus Mode, Limit Screen Sharing, and Seamlessly Transfer Meetings

Another month brings another round of updates to the Zoom platform, and we are so excited to see how our latest features and product updates will impact how you engage with others on our platform.

This month’s releases help users further secure and streamline their communications and gain insights into how their users are communicating over Zoom. These improvements include the release of Focus Mode, enhancements to the Zoom Phone dashboard, Zoom Team Chat sidebar enhancements, and more.

Be sure to visit our support page for the full release notes and click the ‘Follow’ button on the right side of the page to get our latest product updates delivered right to your inbox. Here’s a roundup of the updates for this month:   

Focus Mode

Focus Mode does just that - it helps keep people focused in a Zoom meeting. Designed with educators in mind, Focus Mode places meeting participants in a view where they are only able to see themselves, the host/co-hosts, and the content they are sharing. In this view, hosts and co-hosts can also choose to view participants in gallery view, enabling them to see all participants simultaneously. 

Transfer meeting from mobile to desktop

The world of work is changing, and employees need to communicate and collaborate effectively, whether at the office or on the go. The ability to seamlessly transition a virtual meeting from mobile to desktop and back to mobile allows you to continue your conversations no matter what life sends your way. 

Limit screen sharing for meetings with external participants

To prevent the sharing of sensitive information, admins can apply restrictions to specific users or to groups that prevent them from screen sharing when a guest participant (a user external to the host’s account) joins a meeting. These users will still be able to screen share when there are no guest participants. 

Automatic reactions from gesture recognition

We added some great new iPad functionality and our newest iPad feature takes expression to the next level by bringing some of your real-life gestures into your meeting. Automatic reactions from gesture recognition enables users to use visual gestures, such as a raised hand, to automatically use a corresponding meeting reaction. Currently, this feature only supports the Raise Hand and Thumbs Up reactions. 

Privacy feature for shared lines

For our virtual phone system customers who leverage shared lines, we’ve released a feature that enhances the security and privacy of calls on shared lines. When members of a shared line group and a shared line appearance enable the privacy feature during the call, it prevents others from picking up a held call, listening, whispering, barging, or taking over the call.

Note: This feature is not supported on desk phones and requires client version 5.7.6 or higher.

More call queue visibility

We’ve also provided enhancements to our admin dashboard to add more visibility into metrics associated with call queues. This includes providing account owners and admins with the ability to view the top 10 extensions by call usage (for example, inbound, outbound, internal calls) or minutes usage (for example, international mins, toll-free minutes). 

Granular control of call monitoring privileges

Account owners and admins can now select specific privileges to customize call monitoring groups. For example, they can only allow the group to barge into calls. Previously, setting a privilege would automatically grant all lower-level privileges. This feature will not have any effect on existing settings for call monitoring groups. 

Chat sidebar enhancements

We’ve made further enhancements to the Zoom Team Chat sidebar to streamline the user experience. These include:

• The addition of clear markers that note whether a chat channel is public or private. 
• An update to the Zoom Team Chat sidebar to display fewer chats and channels per group. 
• The ability to expand the Zoom Team Chat sidebar to see more chats and channels. 

Additionally, our updated search functionality can again be found on the client’s left side, creating an interface that is more familiar to our users. 

Be sure to download the latest Zoom client to enjoy all of these latest updates and features. And to see what we have planned for future product updates, head over to our Zoomtopia registration page to secure your seat at this year’s exciting virtual event!