Adding external users to Zoom Team Chat

[lyonsmik]

I will have 50 or so students participating in a Zoom discussion. They are from various countries and organizations - I do not have their contact details. After the live session is over, I want to invite the students to continue discussion asynchronously in Zoom Teams Chat.

How do I invite them in to Zoom Teams Chat?

Were this Slack, Discord etc, I could send the students a link or QR code.... 

[Ray_Harwood]

Hi, @lyonsmik,

Zoom Contacts can be included in chat by either requesting to be added (with your approval) or by you requesting them to join (with their approval). 

See this Zoom Support article on managing Zoom Contacts. If you will not have access to their Email address, just ask them to follow the “How to add a new contact“ section using your email address. If you do have their email address, you file those instructions with their email address.

[lyonsmik]

I see. The students add me as a contact. Then, what is the next step to inviting them to my Zoom Team Chat?

[GaryC8]

Hi Ray, 

Thanks for this information.  Does adding a contact make them part of my company's Zoom Team and will those contacts then have access to any of the other chats and/or Team, or will they be restricted to chats created by an Admin?  Also, do you know whether there is a charge for each additional contact added to a Zoom chat? 

Gary

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @GaryC8.

I'm talking here about you asking someone else to be an external contact for you - they're listed just for you.  I don't think the account Admin has any (or at least not much) control over individually added external contacts.

So, adding an "external contact" does not make them part of the Zoom "team" or your organizations "Team Chat".  If you add them to a Team Chat, others will be able to see their information, but if you just put them in your external  contacts, they're not seen by others.  They are identified in the channel as "external".  Here's a large chat channel I'm in - it's not my channel, but all of the other people from other companies are identified as "external" to me.  I have only added a few of these people directly to my External Contacts.

A side benefit (or maybe an annoyance at times) is that if you use the Invite button in a Meeting or Webinar (Alt-I shortcut, also shown at the bottom of the Panelist menu), your external contacts are also listed there.  This can be great if you really want to invite them to something out of the blue, but it can clutter up the list a little if you're looking only for Internal contacts.  I've found the easy way to filter the list to only internal contacts - assuming you all have email addresses from the same domain - is to type most/all of the domain in the search field.