Zoom has announced a new feature that allows meeting organizers to track participants’ attendance status. The new feature, simply called Presence Status, will allow hosts to track the status of their attendees joining a meeting. This feature, however, will only work for attendees who have Google or Outlook calendar services and have enabled their schedules to integrate with the Zoom app.
How Zoom attendance works
For this feature to work, participants must allow Zoom on their phones or PCs to access their Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook Calendar services. This will pair them with Zoom and therefore automatically keep track of when a meeting organizer invites a participant to join.
Once the integration is enabled on the participants side, the meeting organizer can keep track of whether the invited participant has joined the meeting or not. The Didn’t Join section will appear in the latest version of Zoom (currently in beta only), which will display invited members who didn’t show up. The host will also be able to see the status of participants’ responses to invitations in the calendar – from accepted, rejected, possibly “not answered”.
On this tab, meeting organizers can click “ask to join”to remind users to join the meeting. This feature will either provide the target user with an automatic call to remind them to join the meeting, or send a text message through Zoom’s own chat feature, serving the same purpose.
Interestingly, the company has clarified that this feature will only work for meetings with up to 200 participants, which should really cover most of us. This will also not apply to recurring meetings that are scheduled at regular intervals. This feature will not automatically apply to existing meetings after an app version upgrade, but will instead apply to new meetings that are created after the upgrade.
Zoom has also added other features such as shared slide management, which allows multiple users to manage a shared presentation. The video conferencing service will also allow users of the service to receive more detailed responses to surveys conducted on the platform.