Archiving for meetings and webinars
Zoom’s Meeting Archiving feature is an mechanism to capture and archive meeting and breakout room data including voice, video, captions/transcripts, and in-meeting chat messages. This archived data can be set-up to be accessed by third party compliance and archiving platforms to help organizations meet their compliance and monitoring needs.
Archiving supports Zoom Compliance Manager powered by ThetaLake(ZCM) and third-party compliance platforms (for example, Smarsh, Global Relay).
These integrations capture meeting content to help organizations manage their compliance needs and are distinct from standard recording or transcription features.
Once you have set up archiving for meetings and webinars, you can modify archiving settings.
Requirements for archiving meetings and webinars
Note: Contact Zoom Support to enable this feature.
How is archiving different from recording
Recording and archiving are separate features that operate independently of each other. Specifically:
- Recording is controlled by meeting hosts and generates recordings and transcripts only when explicitly enabled.
- Archiving is an account-level feature designed to support organizations in meeting their compliance requirements. When enabled, it automatically captures meeting data (including audio transcripts) for regulated users, regardless of whether recording is enabled or turned off.
Because these features are independent, disabling recording does not prevent recordings and transcripts from being generated through archiving.
Scopes for meeting and webinar archival
This feature only covers archiving content for Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars, as content in Zoom Phone and other products is not eligible for archiving through this solution.
Zoom’s Meeting Archiving solution is an automated mechanism to collect and archive meeting communications. This solution relies on vendor partners and customers to develop and offer Marketplace apps that allow for the retrieval of the archived communication via a set of APIs. Meeting and webinar artifacts can be archived from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 60 days by default.
General archiving scope
Meetings and webinars hosted by a user marked for compliance will be archived. If a user who is marked for compliance joins any internal meeting as a participant, the meeting will be archived.
If joining an external meeting, no meeting data will be archived by default. If the user’s account has external audio archiving enabled or external chat archiving enabled, the audio or chat in external meetings will be archived. To enable audio archiving on external meetings, contact Zoom Support.
Archiving scope for Zoom Meetings and Webinars
Meetings with enhanced encryption will be supported for archiving but end-to-end encrypted meetings are not supported at the moment.
The following meeting information will be available to archive:
- Meeting metadata (required): This includes the topic, date, time zone, meeting duration, hostname, meeting ID, unique ID (UUID), and passcode.
- In-meeting chat messages (public and direct): A file containing the display name of the user, email address of the user (excluding guests), tag to differentiate public vs. direct chat, message string, and timestamp.
Note: Meeting reactions, two-way chats in waiting rooms, webinar private chats, backstage chat, breakout room chat, edited messages, and deleted messages can be captured with in-meeting chat messages in a JSON format. To have this feature enabled, contact Zoom Support. - Audio: An audio-only file in M4A format.
- Video: An audio and video file in MP4 format, including screen shares, whiteboard, and annotation.
Note: Whiteboard drawings and annotations are a part of the overall video file. - Captions: A VTT (Video Text Track) file including closed captioning from a meeting.
- Audio transcript: A JSON data file including the audio transcripts.
- AI Conversation: A JSON data file including in-meeting questions asked with Zoom AI, as well as their associated answers.
Notes:
- The meeting information listed above is also available to archive within breakout rooms. To enable archiving for breakout rooms, contact Zoom Support.
- Archiving is triggered once a regulated user joins the meeting. Meetings hosted by a regulated user will start archiving when the host or a regulated user joins the meeting. Regulated users who have external archiving for audio-enabled meetings would not be able to join meetings hosted by users who have Basic (free) accounts.
To indicate that the meeting is being archived and which artifacts are being archived, different types of indicators are present.
Archiving behavior for meetings hosted by a delegated user
There are multiple methods for delegating meeting host responsibilities within the same account, including:
While the delegated user has full meeting host privileges, including the ability to manage participants, control meeting settings, and moderate the session, the delegated user does not assume the identity of the original meeting host. As a result, if the delegated user is not designated as a regulated user within the account's compliance settings, their participation will not trigger the meeting archiving process, even though they are exercising host-level controls and the original meeting host is a regulated user.
Archiving behavior for meetings hosted in Zoom Rooms
Zoom Rooms devices are treated as independent participants for archiving purposes. The archiving behavior depends on how participants join the meeting through the Zoom Rooms device and whether account-level archiving is enabled.
Zoom Rooms as an independent device
When account-level archiving is enabled (for example, Audio Transcripts), the Zoom Rooms device will trigger archiving as soon as it joins the meeting. In this scenario, the Zoom Rooms device is represented as the regulated participant.
If a user starts a meeting on a Zoom Rooms device using a host key, that user gains host privileges but is not recognized as the meeting host. Archiving will be triggered if the host is regulated, because the active participant in the meeting is the Zoom Rooms device itself. Because the host is not directly present in the meeting when archiving is initiated through a host key, archiving will continue even after all regulated users have left the Zoom Rooms meeting.
Joining through client association (companion mode)
If a regulated user joins a meeting through a Zoom Rooms device with a client association (companion mode), the participant identity in the meeting is that of the regulated user rather than the Zoom Rooms device. In this case, archiving is triggered by the regulated user's compliance status.
Regular Zoom Rooms without authentication
Archiving cannot be triggered when a participant is in a physical Zoom Rooms conference room without any login authentication through the Zoom Rooms device. Archiving will not be triggered even if a regulated participant transfers from their laptop to the Zoom Rooms device in the middle of a meeting. Archiving can only be triggered through a client association established at the time the participant joins the meeting.
Archiving behavior for meetings hosted in SIP/H.323 room systems
When a meeting participant uses a room system connecting via the Cloud Room Connector (CRC) with a host key to join a meeting, archiving can be triggered if the meeting host is a regulated user. This behavior is similar to how archiving works with Zoom Rooms devices when a host key is used.
Archiving behavior for users joining via the VideoSDK
VideoSDK meeting participants cannot trigger archiving, regardless of their compliance status or role. Unlike regular Zoom clients or authenticated Zoom Rooms users, VideoSDK participants operate outside the standard archiving trigger mechanisms.
Archival flow
Zoom’s archiving solution has three key components:
- Archiving agent: The archiving agent connects to the archiving engine and is responsible for capturing the meeting artifacts as determined by the account policy. This data is then kept on encrypted storage for a custom amount of time for third-party platforms to ingest through our API and archive accordingly.
- Marketplace application: The marketplace application helps customers who want to capture and archive data from Zoom, and retrieve the data after a meeting. Customers can use a marketplace application that is already present or create their own application, which is configured by the account administrator. APIs are available on Zoom’s platform to ingest the archived meeting artifacts.
- Third-Party Platform: This can be any vendor that has an open API ecosystem to ingest the meeting archiving content appropriately. These can be in-house solutions created by customers as well.
Note: This solution is generic in nature to ensure that a variety of third-party platforms can be considered for archiving use cases.
Archiving process
Zoom's archiving process is as follows:
- A particular archiving application is installed and configured for an account from the Zoom App Marketplace.
- After archiving is enabled for the account, as per the configuration in your account-level settings, meetings/webinars are subject to archiving.
- After the meeting ends, the archived files are stored within Zoom’s cloud storage for a certain number of days. This number can be configured from your account settings and ranges between 1 and 30 days by default.
- There are two ways to retrieve information about your archived artifacts:
- Archiving APIs - The third-party application can also leverage Zoom’s Archiving APIs to fetch the metadata and the download URL, which have been archived for a particular account or for a particular meeting ID.
- Webhooks - When these archived files are present in Zoom’s cloud storage, you can choose to receive a notification whenever the files for your account’s meetings/webinars are available to download using Zoom’s Archiving Webhook. Using the webhook is completely optional.
- The third-party platform can get this information and apply business logic to handle its data.
How to enable archiving for an account
To enable Meeting Archiving for your account, Admins can contact Zoom Support and request Meeting and Webinar Archiving be enabled for your account. If the request is approved, archiving will be enabled for the account.
Manage archiving settings
Once enabled for your account, administrators can configure archiving for their account from within their Account Settings page to specify the exact content to be archived for your account as well as customize the Archiving disclaimer for users in your account. In addition to enabling archiving at the account level, archiving can also be applied to individual user groups as well.
When enabling archiving for either the account or at the group level, admins can also customize the archiving disclaimer.
Disable the archiving feature
Admins can disable archiving for the account by turning off and locking the Archive meetings and webinars option at the account level from your Account settings page.
Additionally, you can disable the Archiving API by removing the scope from your marketplace application, or removing the Marketplace app or custom app built from within your Marketplace account
Developer guide for archiving
This section is a brief description of the various types of meeting/webinar artifacts as well as how to capture them for archiving.
For this section, we will assume the developer already has the concept of Zoom marketplace application development. Please refer to this document for context about Zoom API and webhook subscriptions.
The archiving webhook is not published on our marketplace to ensure access is only provided for customers and developers who intend to use it for archiving only. Contact Zoom Support with your application ID so that we can allow access to the webhook.
Note: There are other in-meeting artifacts that an organization may want to archive for compliance purposes that are available through other APIs. These artifacts may include polls, satisfaction surveys, or Q&A results.
| eComm Artifact | Method to achieve |
|---|
| In-Meeting Chat - public & private | Archiving API |
| Webinar Chat - public & private | Archiving API |
| Closed Caption/Live Transcript | Archiving API/Designated API |
| Polls | Meeting and Webinar Polling API |
| Q&A (Webinar) | Webinar Q&A API |
| Satisfaction Survey | Dashboard API |
| Reactions and Non-verbal feedback (Meetings only) | Archiving API |
| Whiteboard | Archiving API - part of the video stream and separate file download |
| Annotation | Archiving API - part of the Video stream |
| Breakout Rooms | Archiving API |
| Registration Questions | Meeting and Webinar Registration Questions |
Archival APIs
All the meeting and webinar artifacts that are archived can be retrieved with the archiving APIs. Zoom offers the capability to list archived files of a specific account as well as the archived artifacts for a specific meeting or webinar between two different timestamps.
You can learn more about the different APIs Zoom provides for archiving by visiting the Archiving API section in our marketplace.
Archival webhook
The webhook event is triggered every time the archived files of a meeting or webinar become available to download. The marketplace application must be configured to subscribe to this event, which can be done during the initial setup for the application.
You can learn more about the webhook by visiting the Webhook Reference section in our developer documentation.