The Zoom dashboard and getting started

Now we have set up our Zoom account, we are going to have a look is the dashboard and also get started on our first meeting. So as you see here, this is the main Zoom dashboard. What we can do, we can upload pictures, if you want to upload a profile picture, you can just hit this pencil icon in the middle and upload that, and we can change our name, we have got this test ADSQ here, just as a generic name, but down here, we can also add telephone numbers, change the default language and time zones, the date format and the time format. Now, if you are... The reason these are important is if you are running a meeting with somebody and it is people in different areas, it is a good idea to know what time zone you are in, so that when it is setting a time zone meeting for you here and someone else may be in Spain, that each person knows what time the meeting starts.

So if you set it off at 1 o'clock in the afternoon UK time, the program within Zoom will know to tell the person in Spain they need to log in one hour later at 2:00 PM.

Other things down here, you can change the way that IDs work and in that, that is a bit more advanced, we are not going to worry too much about this on this film, but also, you can change it. Here you can see we have got a basic account or we can upgrade. So the upgrade allows you to have 100 participants and lots of other features, so it is definitely worth looking at it. Currently, it is an annual subscription, and it is around about 12-13 pounds per month to register for it, and then you are buying in dollars, so it is just an approximation of the price. Down here, you have got the sign-in section where you can change your sign-in email and set, change your password. As we said before, it is always a good idea to change passwords every now and again, just to keep everything secure, and also you can have two-factor authentication with your account, so it can send you a text or an email when you log in, so it just stops anybody else being able to log in without your secondary device, which is usually something like a mobile phone.

Going back up to the top, on the left-hand menu, this is the profile side, but if you just go down to the meeting section, this is where any meetings we have are shown. So here we have got up and coming, previous meetings, personal room and some templates. So to start with, we are just going to work on this main page, but before we create a meeting, we will just have a look down the side. Webinars is something that is a paid option, so with the free one, we do not have that, but the recording section, this will allow you to record. Now, when you are recording a message on Zoom, it will pop up with a message and an indication so that everyone on the meeting does know that this meeting is being recorded. The settings are where you can change some default settings depending on the paid or not unpaid, that you would be able to do different things in here, but within this side, you can change the way that the system works, whether you have passwords with the meetings, meeting IDs, how you can communicate the links to people and things like that.

So you can also set on here, some default settings, so you don't have to keep changing the setting each time, and also, how the emails go out to notify people who are actually on the meeting.

Down here are the admin side, which is the user admins, you can allocate users. A lot of these settings down here are over the top for what you need, and a lot of them have got, as you can see, a tour, which helps you understand a little bit more about that particular setting. So there is loads of help here should you need it. Now, we are not going to worry too much down here because these are more advanced settings, and we just want to really look at how can we actually create this meeting for the first time. So then we can schedule a meeting or we can directly host the meetings. Hosting a meeting on this top right corner with the video on, we can just go through the questions there, and it will tell us what the ID is, but the key one is supposing we want to schedule a meeting, I am going to schedule it for today, so we just hit the scheduled meeting, so we can just put in here and call it a test Zoom meeting.

We can put a description in as well if we want to. Along here, we have got the dates it is. So you can hit this little calendar icon and that will then set the date. We can also set the time, so we will set this meeting for 1 o'clock this afternoon, how long it is going to be, so we are going to change that to a short meeting, 15 minutes, and what we have got here is a pop-up that shows that as we are on the basic plan, we have got a maximum time of 40 minutes for the meeting.

We can get rid of that meeting pop-up by just putting a tick in the box, we can confirm the time zone, so if we were going to set this meeting for a time zone in Spain or in Australia or wherever, we can change that, but by default, it will stay with the one you have set on the setting. If you are doing a recurring meeting, maybe you meet with your family every day or every week, you can literally click here and you can change it over to have a weekly meeting or a monthly meeting if you want.

We can set a password. So here, we can just have a password here and we can just call this password whatever you want. So we are going to make it easier, we are just going to call it Pro Trainings. I am trying to put the word Pro Trainings in there, but it is too long because there is a maximum number of characters you can have. So if you want to try and put a name that is too big, then you have to shorten it down. So what we are going to do is just abbreviate that to ProT, so just a four-digit character.

There is a lot of other things here we can preset when the video is on and off, so if you want to make it so that our video comes on straight away and also participants when they log in, the video comes on straight away, then we set that, that means they do not need to physically turn their video on nor do you, which is a good idea because if someone comes on and you need to communicate with them, at least their video is on, if they have not got their sound turned on, then at least you can just tell them and they can indicate to them because they can see you that there is a problem with it.

We can then have other settings here allowing people to join each time and mute people automatically. So if you have a larger group, you want to mute people when they come into your meeting, you can do that. Once you have actually created that and you have got all the settings okay, just hit the Save button and that has created the meeting. You can add it to your calendar if you want, your Google Calendar or any other calendar on the system that is listed here, you can see what the password is. So we have got ProT as the password, and here is actually the link for the meeting. So what we can do is highlight that meeting link, copy it, and then we can paste that into an email, we can send it on an internal chat system, we can copy it over and put it onto a text message and send it to somebody, or you can hit the button here which says copy invitation, and that is the formal invitation that comes out, so what you got here is all the information that's in the meeting. So it's got the password, the meeting ID and all the other details there, so you can either copy that that way or you can copy it down here and then you can get out of that when you are done with it.

If you needed it to edit this meeting, just literally go down to the meeting here, where it says edit, and you can change all the settings that you have here, anything you want, you can just change it, hit save, or if you are happy with the settings as they are, hit cancel and that will not affect the meeting, it is taking you straight back to the beginning. So when we then go back on to the meetings page, what we will then see is the meeting we set up for today at 1 o'clock. If we just hover the mouse over the top of it, it will then say, start, edit and delete. So if we wanted to start that meeting, we hit start and then that meeting is set up and ready to go.