Manage participants in Zoom waiting rooms and breakout rooms

Waiting rooms

To make meetings as secure as possible and to minimise potential disruption, the waiting room feature is enabled on UTS Zoom accounts and cannot be turned off. Participants from UTS must be signed into Zoom with their UTS credentials to access your meeting. Any guest participants from outside UTS will be placed into the waiting room when they join your meeting, and you will need to manually admit them using the following instructions.

Start your scheduled Zoom meeting, then select ‘Manage Participants’ from the meeting navigation menu.

Participants who are waiting to join the meeting will be listed in the ‘Manage Participants’ window. Select ‘Admit’ next to the participant’s name to allow an individual person to join the meeting. Only admit participants if you can identify them from the displayed name.

Select ‘Admit All’ to allow all waiting participants to join the meeting.

To put a participant back into the waiting room, select ‘Put in waiting room’ from the ‘More’ drop down next to the participant’s name.

Breakout rooms

Breakout rooms in Zoom allow you to create sub-meetings within your meeting for smaller groups of participants to collaborate and have discussions. Up to 50 Breakout rooms can be created for one meeting.

When you are in your Zoom meeting select ‘Breakout Rooms’ from the bottom navigation menu.

Select the number of rooms you would like to create from the drop down list. Select one of the following options:

• Assign automatically – Zoom will split your participants equally into rooms
• Assign manually – allows you to select which participants go into each room
• Let participants choose room – participants can select and move rooms themselves

Select ‘Create’, then the options icon. Tick the options you would like to use for this meeting.

Select ‘Assign’ next to a breakout room to manually add participants to that room. Hover over the participant name and select ‘Move to’ or ‘Exchange’ to amend participants in a room.

Select ‘Open All Rooms’ when you are ready to start the breakout rooms. A green icon will appear next to the participant name once they have successfully joined the room.

When your breakout rooms are open, select ‘Close All Rooms’ to stop the rooms and return all participants to the main meeting.

Find out more…

See the Zoom help page for more information on breakout room options and managing breakout rooms.

Pre-assigning participants to Breakout Rooms

In some cases you may need to organise breakout rooms before you run your Zoom meeting – to do this, you need to enable this setting in Zoom.

Important!

To ensure that pre-assigning Breakout Rooms functions correctly, you will need to change your ‘Schedule Meeting’ settings to only allow authenticated users to join meetings:

Login to UTS Zoom and select ‘Settings’ in the left hand navigation menu.

• Select ‘In meeting (advanced)’ from the sub-menu under the ‘Meeting’ tab. If you can’t see the sub-menu you may need to maximise your browser window.
• Scroll down to the ‘Breakout room’ section. If the right hand icon is grey, click to turn it blue and switched on.
• Select the checkbox labelled ‘Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling’.

Select ‘Schedule a Meeting’ at the top of the page.

Fill in the details of your meeting. Under ‘Meeting options’, tick the box for ‘Breakout Room pre assign’.

Setting up: manual or CSV file?

•  To set up the breakout rooms manually, select ‘Create rooms’ and follow the instructions on the Zoom guide to pre-assigning participants using the web portal.
•  To set up the breakout rooms using a CSV file, select ‘Import from CSV’ and use the template and instructions on the Zoom guide to pre-assigning participants to breakouts rooms using a CSV file.

Starting a meeting with pre-assigned breakout rooms

Start your meeting and select ‘Breakout rooms’ from the meeting menu. The breakout rooms that you set up previously will appear in a new window. When participants have entered the meeting, their names will appear below the breakout room you assigned them. Select ‘Open All Rooms’ when you are ready to start the breakout rooms.

Recovering to pre-assigned breakout rooms

During your meeting you may want to recover the breakout rooms that you pre-assigned. If a participant joins the meeting after you start the breakout rooms or you change the breakout rooms during the meeting, recovering pre-assigned rooms will move participants back into the room you originally assigned them to before the meeting.

 If you have breakout rooms in progress, select ‘Close all rooms’ in the breakout rooms window to end them. Select ‘Recreate’ from the breakout rooms window menu. Then select ‘Recover to pre-assigned rooms’.

Select ‘Open all rooms’ to start the breakout rooms.

Self-selecting a breakout room

If the meeting host has selected to allow participants to choose their own breakout room, participants will be able to enter and leave breakout rooms as they like.

1. Select the ‘Breakout Rooms’ icon in the meeting navigation menu.
2. Select ‘join’ next to the breakout room you wish to enter from the list.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 to move to different breakout rooms.
4. Select ‘Leave Room’ to return to the main session.

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