What's New at Zoom | August 2023 Recap

[allieblum]

Every month we share a recap of new products, features, ZLC courses, business updates, and more with account admins and owners in our What's New at Zoom email newsletter. Take a look at all that's happened at Zoom within the last month, with some additional announcements about upcoming happenings. Download the latest version of the Zoom desktop client to access all these features and more. And remember to check out our release notes for a complete list of past releases across the Zoom platform. 

Zoom Learning Center Updates

• Learning in your preferred language has never been easier - We’ve revamped the Zoom Learning Center catalog with buttons that take you to global language options with a single click. Easily browse and enroll in a variety of courses in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean.

• Create a seamless hybrid experience with Workspace Reservation - Whether you’re a user or admin, learn how to make Workspace Reservation work for you in this free course collection. Check-in your guests, book a desk for your day in the office, or reserve the cafe for a company party, all from the convenience of your desktop or tablet.

• Harness the power of Zoom Virtual Agent chatbots and campaigns - Learn how to customize your Zoom Virtual Agent chatbots and campaigns to create a personalized AI experience your end users will love. Admins, enroll free today!

Events & Training

• Zoomtopia 2023 - On October 3-4, join us at Zoomtopia, our incredible, award-winning event happening in San Jose. Learn to embrace the flexibility and power that AI and the Zoom platform offers. Secure your spot to delve into topics like employee health and productivity, return to office and remote work, the balance between human and technology, and more. If you're an education or healthcare customer, be sure to join us for special programming, Education Connect and Healthcare Connect. 
• Zoomtopia EMEA, Oct. 4-5 | Virtual - Discover new ways to improve collaboration, make more impactful decisions, and deepen customer relationships at Zoomtopia EMEA, our incredible, award-winning event. You’re in for the most exciting, interactive, and inspiring event of the year, for decision-makers across industries!

• Get an exclusive look into the latest innovations shaping the future of work and the workplace. 
• Discover how to leverage AI to create a more efficient and flexible work environment.
• Learn from industry thought leaders about the tech trends that matter to you.
• Zoom Events training hub - Visit the Zoom Events training hub to sign up for educational sessions about our Zoom Events product. Training sessions are available every month, including a monthly release discussion and Q&A, where our experts will walk you through the latest Zoom Events release, including key benefits for a variety of use cases like customer training, internal communications, marketing and more. Don’t forget to bookmark the Zoom Events Training hub and check back regularly for new training opportunities.    

Key Highlights from Zoom’s August Releases 

Zoom Clips Updates

• General public beta availability for Zoom Clips - Zoom Clips offer a convenient solution for capturing both personal video and screen activities, allowing users to effortlessly share their recordings with others. This feature is particularly valuable when demonstrating product features or showcasing various functionalities. Users can conveniently access their Clips through their client or web portal, and receive notifications about views, comments, and replies related to their Clips. The feature can be enabled or disabled at the account, group, or user level and is available for public beta during this release. To learn more about Zoom Clips, visit the Zoom Clips support page.

Zoom Client Updates

• Meeting Summary: Next Steps and Segment Titles - Windows, macOS - The Meeting Summary feature, which uses AI to analyze and summarize in-meeting discussions, is enhanced to also include a list of next steps mentioned in the meeting and titles for each segment of the meeting . These next steps and segment titles are included in the email and Team Chat summary shared with the host and participants (if allowed).

Zoom Web Updates

• Enhanced feedback form: Admin control - The Give Feedback form, available in the desktop client and mobile app, is redesigned to enable customers to provide satisfaction scores and provide feedback on Zoom’s product suite. Admins can choose to provide this feedback option for users on their account, as well as allow users to provide text feedback or just satisfaction scores. This setting is available at the account, group, and user levels. 
• Auto-start Meeting Summary with Zoom IQ - Admins can allow their users to have the Meeting Summary feature automatically start for any meetings they host, skipping the need for them to manually enable the summary generation during their meetings. Users can still stop and start the summary as needed in the meeting. This is available as a sub-setting to the current Meeting Summary with Zoom IQ setting, available at the account, group, and user-level settings pages.
• Additional captioning language support - Automated captioning support is expanding to include captioning for the Farsi/Persian and Romanian languages, both in Beta. These languages are enabled by default, but admins can control the availability of these languages through the Automated captions setting within the web portal.
• Additional translated captioning language support - Translated captioning support is expanding to include caption translation from English to Tamil and English to Hebrew, as well as translation support between Portuguese, Romanian Persian, and Canadian French with all other currently supported languages. All of these newly supported languages are currently in Beta. These languages are enabled by default, but admins can control the availability of these languages through the Translated captions setting within the web portal.

Zoom Scheduler Updates

• Allow attendees to add guests to scheduled appointments - Attendees can add guests when they book or reschedule an appointment. A maximum of 100 guests can be added to an appointment. Additionally, guests can reschedule, decline, or delete an appointment. Previously, attendees had to add guests after creating an appointment outside Zoom Scheduler within their calendaring application.

Zoom IQ for Sales Updates

• Multi-Language transcript translation - Users can easily translate conversation transcripts into multiple languages on demand and save these translations for future viewing. This feature currently supports Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese in addition to English. 

Zoom Phone Updates

• Provisioning Template - Account owners and administrators can no longer utilize the parameters provisioning/firmware/url and provision.url in the provisioning template. If these parameters are being updated in an existing template or included in a new template, an error will occur, indicating the need for their removal. However, templates created before this change will remain unaffected, and no action is required for them. If configuring these items is critical, submit a request to Zoom Support to have this enabled for your account.
• Provisioning walkthrough for Zoom Phone admins - Shows admins how to add users to their Zoom account and provision them with the desired Zoom Phone calling plans (extensions) and phone numbers as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Zoom Events Updates

• Upload recording files to Zoom's cloud recording storage for simulive - A recording file can be placed into Zoom's cloud recording storage and linked to the hub so that the hub owner or hub hosts can choose it when they are scheduling a simulive webinar. Hosts can set up a simulive webinar and upload their own preferred video. Once the video is processed, it can be selected as the simulive source. Uploaded recordings are also visible in the Zoom web portal recording list and are tagged with the “From a Zoom Events Hub” label.
  Note: This feature must be enabled by Zoom. Zoom Events users who have qualified for video replacement can also upload recordings for Simulive. Zoom Events users who are not on a qualifying account can use Simulive but can only select from existing hub recordings. For additional questions, contact Zoom Support to discuss whether this feature is available for your account.
• Security code at event join - Hosts can enable the Security code at join option in the event creation setup. A security code will be sent to each attendee's inbox every time they join the host's event. Depending on the attendees' event authentication portfolio, attendees who join an event with the  Security code at join option enabled will have different scenarios.

Zoom Whiteboard Updates

• Allow users who are not signed in to create in-meeting whiteboards - Users who are not signed in can initiate and take part in whiteboard sessions during a Zoom meeting, leveraging the "Host owns all boards" feature. This functionality enables unsigned users to view and create a whiteboard, which will be owned by the host since the user is not signed in. To simplify the sign-in process, sign-in options are displayed within both the meeting and whiteboarding interfaces, enabling users to conveniently sign in while actively participating in a meeting or whiteboarding session.

Zoom Virtual Agent Updates

• Amazon Connect integration - Account owners and admins can integrate Zoom Virtual Agent with Amazon Connect. This feature can be leveraged to enable the utilization of Amazon Connect as a chat platform when this feature is enabled for the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With this integration, the knowledge base team can also create a knowledge base sync with Amazon Connect system, mirroring the familiar structure of existing CRM integrations.

Zoom Contact Center Updates

• Virtual Service Numbers for Japan - Zoom Contact Center is introducing the ability for admins to purchase Virtual Service Numbers (050 & 0ABJ) in Japan, enabling agents to receive inbound calls and make outbound calls. Account owners and admins can select their preferred number from the pre-populated list, with a notification displaying the concurrent call limitations for each phone number type. Admins will be required to schedule a video call during Japan working hours to show the actual documents uploaded for verification. Call routing for 0ABJ outbound calls will be geographically based, with specific routing requirements for Eastern and Western cities of Japan.
• Enhancement to 10DLC registration - To comply with carrier regulations and avoid potential message blocking and surcharges, Zoom Contact Center is introducing a warning message for agents who send SMS from US/CA Virtual Service numbers but have not created a 10DLC campaign. This warning will be displayed whenever agents send messages via the Zoom Contact Center client. Messages will not be blocked if a valid 10DLC campaign is active, pending, or associated with the phone number used for messaging. SMS-enabled numbers that are not US/CA numbers are exempt from this requirement.

Business Announcements

• Upcoming Support Site Maintenance – Maintenance is being performed on Zoom’s support site in November (date and time coming soon). During this time, support.zoom.us and the support ticketing form will not be accessible, though you can still use Zoom Community, chatbot, and phone support (based on your plan). Please note that once maintenance is performed, tickets closed more than a year ago will no longer be accessible. You can refer to the support article and check the Zoom status page closer to November for more information. 
• Zoom Software Lifecycle Policy - We plan to enforce the next round of our Software Lifecycle Policy on November 4, 2023, for all products and services, starting with the minimum versions referenced in the table found here. Users running an end-of-life version after November 4 will not be able to join meetings via the Zoom Client and will be prompted to update or join from the Web browser. As always, we highly recommend you regularly download and update to the latest version of Zoom software by checking for updates within the Zoom desktop client or by navigating to zoom.us/download to take advantage of all our latest security and functionality features. 

[Bri]

Thank you for sharing @allieblum ! So many exciting things coming up 📆

[KhatC]

Thanks for sharing, @allieblum! A lot of customers have asked about the feature to upload recording files to Zoom's cloud recording storage for simulive so I'm excited to see that this is included in the update.

[crissyd]

Awesome August recap, @allieblum ! 

+1 on the ability to upload recordings to Zoom's cloud recording storage for Simulive, @KhatC . This would be very helpful.

I personally liked the Zoom IQ for Sales (rebranded to Zoom Revenue Accelerator) Update: Multi-Language transcript translation. I read about this a few days ago but haven't tested it yet. This is so cool and will definitely address various use cases. Very inclusive too!