Phil Simon - Zoom For Dummies

Zoom For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and may not be used without written permission. Zoom is a trademark of Zoom Video Communications, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941202

ISBN 978-1-119-74214-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-74216-6 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-74215-9 (epub)

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 4
4. Chapter 5
5. Chapter 6
6. Chapter 7
7. Chapter 8
8. Chapter 11
9. Chapter 16

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11

Depending on your age, you may take todays powerful communication technologies for granted. (I have done it myself.) Trust me, however: Not that long ago, communicating with others was a dramatically different experience.

As recently as the early 1990s, the most pervasive methods for exchanging messages included instruments of which you may have never heard: landlines, intra-office memos, typewriters, and Telex and fax machines. For personal correspondence, handwritten letters were commonplace, not relics of a bygone era.

The following statistic illustrates the extent to which communication has changed over the last 30-plus years.

On January 24, 2001, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a study on the telecommunications industry. Remarkably, the FCC found that the average per-minute rate for interstate calls in 1984 was roughly 17 cents. (Read the study yourself at bit.ly/fcc-zoom .)

Say that you lived in northern New Jersey in 1984, as I did at the time. You called your friend in New York and talked for an hour. You could expect to pay $10 for the privilege. And forget about international calls. Back then, talking to someone in another country was prohibitively expensive. (And you think that long-distance relationships are hard now?) Even worse, the quality and reliability of audio calls usually left more than a bit to be desired. As for video calls, they were pipe dreams back then.

Fast forward to today. Put mildly, were not in Kansas anymore.

Communication has undergone a veritable sea change. Thank the usual suspects: increasingly powerful computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, email, Moores Law, social networks, smartphones with their ber-addictive apps, the explosion of affordable broadband connections, improvements from telecommunications carriers, ambitious entrepreneurs, and cloud computing.

The most recent addition to this formidable list is Zoom. Its suite of tools allows hundreds of millions of people to communicate and collaborate easily, affordably, and reliably with others no matter where they are. Both professionally and personally, Zoom allows people to stay in touch with each other, especially during pandemics and stay-at-home orders.

Zooms products help teachers conduct virtual classes with their students. Pilates and yoga instructors use Zoom in similar ways. Rock bands jam via Zoom, including Marillion one of my very favorites. Rabbis and priests rely upon Zoom to connect with their congregations from their homes. Journalists conduct interviews with it. In the corporate world, Zoom helps salespeople close deals, host untold numbers of employee- and customer- training sessions, and allow executives to address their troops from distant locations.

No, Zoom doesnt solve every conceivable communication problem. No software program can. Still, when used properly, Zoom promotes simple and effective communication and more than 300 hundred million people have taken notice.

Against this backdrop arrives Zoom For Dummies the most extensive guide on how to use this powerful, flexible, affordable, and user-friendly suite of communication and collaboration tools. It provides an in-depth overview of Zooms most valuable features some of which even experienced users may have overlooked. The book youre holding goes beyond merely demonstrating how to install, configure, and customize Zooms flagship Meetings & Chat product, though. It also offers practical tips on how individual users, groups, and even entire firms can get the most out of Zooms tools. Finally and perhaps most important, I describe how to secure Zoom from prying eyes.