Zoom meetings and rooms

[georgewellbeing]

Hi all

We are using zoom as a networking conference type events where people have various discussions in different rooms.  We are using zoom meetings and break out rooms at the moment - we are allowing participants to choose their room but we are not sure how to manage numbers in each room - for instance we may have 40 in one room which is a bit difficult to manage.  Can you set maximum capacity limit in the breakout rooms so people are no longer able to get in if it is full - as then they will be forced to go in another room that we will have set up.  Also what is the difference between break out rooms in meetings and zoom rooms?   And is there a zoom events?   Bit confused haha!   

[Ray_Harwood]

Hi, @georgewellbeing - your question is complex... let me see if I can break it down and make it simpler:

Zoom Rooms isn't really a zoom event type -- it's a way of creating a special interface to a Zoom meeting or webinar where multiple people in a small conference room can all participate together, along with the other remote participants. See this Zoom Support article if you'd like to know more about Zoom Rooms.

Yes, there are "Zoom Events", which can provide for multiple sessions of any combination of Meetings and Webinars, with the most common Zoom Event being the Zoom Conference.  Honestly, a Zoom Meeting or a Zoom Webinar happening inside a Zoom Conference really behaves no differently than it would standing alone without the conference.  There are some additional features to a Zoom Conference, such as a Conference Lobby with interactive chat, an Expo Room with booths for sponsors and other vendors, and an integrated experience as you might find in a variety of other non-Zoom "conference-style" products.  Zoom Conferences are a pretty advanced concept -- not for the beginner -- but if you'd like to know more, read this Zoom Support article.

So... I think we're left with your basic question: How can I limit the number of people in each Breakout Room?  Unfortunately, I think the direct answer to your question is no - there's no way to set a limit on the number of people in each room.  There are workarounds, but I'm guessing the number of overall attendees you have is large, and you really do want to allow people to choose which room to go into.  The workarounds are to use the other two options when creating the room:

• You're probably using "Let participants choose rooms".
• Use "Assign automatically".  If you have 100 people in your meeting, you can create 5 rooms, and Zoom will "randomly" assign 20 people to each room.
• Use "Assign manually".  Once the rooms are created, nobody can choose where they're going to go... you have to manually assign each person to a room.  Again, for a large group, this can take time -- time you probably don't want to take.

So if you want to let people choose their own room, I think you're stuck with letting a bunch of people flock to one place.  You could put in a feature request at this Zoom web page.

I know that's not the answer you were looking for... but hopefully the explanation helped!