Preventing Students From Starting Meetings from the Zoom Client | Community
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mmurray
Newcomer
Newcomer
February 18, 2022

Preventing Students From Starting Meetings from the Zoom Client

  • February 18, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 1 view

I am looking for a way to prevent students from hosting Zoom meetings without teacher supervision. If our students sign-in via Google, the get full access to the Zoom windows client. We are also exploring adding our student email domain as an 'associated domain' to our Zoom environment. With that, they will have a Zoom account created and it will be Basic, permitting them to host a 40-45 minute session. I noticed on another thread that someone recommended that students can be prevented from signing in or joining meetings outside your instance:
I took a closer look at the configuration possibilities for the Zoom client and do not see any option to remove the Start Meeting button (though other areas of the client can be disabled, like Facebook and Google Sign-In). https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362163-Mass-deployment-with-preconfigured-settings-for-Windows

It appears when meetings are started from a browser a zoom.us/s/***** url is loaded.  I've thought about blocking that url string in our content filter (which is installed on all school computers). But I'm not sure if that will work or if it will interact badly with the needed zoom.us traffic like, zoom.us/j/**** which appears to be the url that loads when Joining a meeting. Also, not sure if that url is different when launching a meeting from the Zoom client. Our content filter reporter (iboss) does not show much activity related to the Zoom client.

So bottom line, looking to prevent students from hosting Zoom meetings on win10 and win11 school computers using school accounts.

Any insight on this is appreciated.

    2 replies

    UoPAdmin
    Newcomer
    Newcomer
    February 22, 2022

    We push all our worrying domain users (the students) through SAML to ensure they are who they should be, this doesn't directly help you, indirectly however, changing your sign in systems to a different authentication system can stop them logging in.
    Also, make sure your domain is registered with Zoom, so only you can activate/authenticate the accounts within it.

    dfarren
    Newcomer
    Newcomer
    February 23, 2022

    Do you see all of the student accounts on your Zoom account - under User Management? If so, can you deactivate their accounts? If you are going to have students host meetings for any reason this won't work, but if you deactivate the student account on your Zoom dashboard then they cannot log into Zoom with their school email .