One Zoom Account: One Meeting at a Time

Posted on by

Do you schedule meetings for someone else? Any chance you’ve started doing the same in Zoom?

Did you know that you can only run one meeting at a time from the same Zoom account? In fact, you could end an in-progress meeting by starting the next one, if the two meetings were scheduled on the same account.

Here’s what happens

Last week you scheduled two meetings on your Zoom account, and you named an alternative host to run the first one. You go to start the second meeting while the first meeting is still happening.

You get this…

end-other-meeting

… so you click “End Other Meeting”. Of course. Because you’re thinking “What the heck is Zoom is talking about? Clearly I’m not in another meeting. It’s probably just confused.”

Those who are in that other meeting get this lovely notice:

zoom-meeting-ended

Oops.

It does make sense when you think about Zoom’s per-user licensing model. If you could buy just one Zoom license, then schedule as many overlapping meetings as you like, why would any organization buy more than one license?

The good news is twofold:

  1. All faculty, staff, and students at UVic have paid Zoom accounts
  2. You can give another UVic Zoom user scheduling privileges to your Zoom account

Example

Maria provides administrative support to a group of supervisors in her department. She has “delegate” privileges to their Outlook calendars, and has been setting up meetings on their behalf for years.

Along comes Zoom. She’s been setting up Zoom meetings, using her own Zoom account and adding the supervisors as alternative hosts so they can start the meetings themselves. It doesn’t take long before they hit the overlapping-meeting scenario and we have some unhappy people.

The solution:

  1. Each supervisor adds Maria to their Zoom account in the scheduling privileges section.
  2. Maria re-signs in to her Zoom account on the desktop client to get the new permissions.
  3. Maria schedules a meeting, selecting the “Schedule For” option in the Advanced Options section.
  4. Maria selects the supervisor’s name from the picklist. The Zoom meeting will be scheduled on the supervisor’s Zoom account.

Summary

  1. You can’t run concurrent Zoom meetings from the same account
  2. If you schedule meetings for others, have them add you to their Zoom account with scheduling privileges