New and enhanced features
- Administrator features
- Consolidated Meeting and Calendar tabs: Admin control
The Meetings and Calendar tabs are merging to provide the greater visibility of the calendar view with the meeting details needed for your daily tasks. Easily view and filter upcoming meetings, view the invitees and their responses, and review shared materials ahead of the session, while also reviewing previous meetings and their assets, such as recordings, continuous meeting chats, whiteboards, and more. This change will be rolled out to accounts over time and be controlled through a web setting available at the account, group, and user levels. Initially, Basic, Pro, and some smaller Business accounts will have this available with the March release, with this enabled by default for those Basic and Pro accounts. Other accounts can expect this in an upcoming release, which can be managed for eligible accounts through the Feature Release Controls. - Anonymous questions for Webinar Q&A: Admin control
The settings for Q&A are available in the Zoom web portal for admins to set the default for all users on the account. These settings are available at the account, group, and user levels, and admins can also lock the Allow anonymous questions sub-setting. - Meeting wallpapers: Admin control
Meeting hosts can customize the wallpaper in their meeting, adding more color and customization to their meeting view. The host or co-host can choose from preset images provided by Zoom or their account admins. With a selection made, they can also adjust how much to blend the participant videos with the wallpaper image. Admins can control use of this at the account level, as well as provide additional default images, which are available to the host and co-host during meetings. Images uploaded through the web portal by admins must be JPG/JPEG or 24-bit PNG with a maximum size of 15 MB. The recommended resolution is 1920x1080px. - AI-generated Virtual Backgrounds: Admin control
Generate a custom virtual background to suit your needs. Found within the virtual background selection window, eligible users can choose from preset options provided or enter a description of the virtual background they would like to generate. An AI-model will generate a few images to choose from, which can be immediately selected as your virtual background. Admins can control the use of this feature through account and group-level settings. This feature will be rolling out to accounts over the next few months. - Expanded support for disabling remote control with external participants
The admin ability to control the use of the remote control feature when external participants are present is expanded to include preventing guests from controlling other guests’ screens and preventing internal users from controlling a guest's screen. There are no direct changes to the Disable remote control and remote support for guests in a meeting web setting, as the expanded support will be implemented as part of this existing setting. As a reminder, this setting is available at the account, group, and user levels. - Full emoji suite support for Webinar Reactions: Admin control
Similar to Meeting Reactions, Webinar Reactions are able to utilize the full suite of available emojis, in addition to the 6 standard emojis. Availability of all emojis versus the standard set can be controlled at the account, group, and user level settings pages. - Customized waiting room for Webinars: Admin control
Account admins can customize the waiting room experience for webinars, allowing customization of the image, text, and other waiting room assets that attendees see before joining each session and providing a more engaging and branded joining experience for attendees. These custom assets can be saved to webinar templates for reuse. The Webinar Waiting Room customization settings are available at the account, group, and user-level settings pages. Admins can set defaults for the account, as well as control a sub-setting that allows users to customize their webinar waiting rooms with their own uploaded image or video. This feature will be rolling out to accounts over the next months. - Support for multiple Vanity URLs
Accounts with multiple brands or separate divisions within their organization can request multiple Vanity URLs for their Zoom account, allowing them to have multiple dedicated vanity URLs for their various brand names consolidated on one account. For each Vanity URL approved for the account, admins can configure a custom branding for each custom landing page. When adding multiple Vanity URLs, the first requested and approved URL is used as the default for the account. Admins can also assign a default Vanity URL for each user group, ensuring that Vanity URL is applied to their meeting join links. - Survey & Poll: Admin control for free text answers
Account owners and admins can enable or disable the long and short free text answer for Survey & Poll creators. This setting is available at the account level. - Exclude all types of hosts from taking a survey
The Exclude hosts, co-hosts, and panelists from taking survey setting has been created to prevent individuals with hosting roles from participating in surveys, streamlining the administration process and ensuring more accurate and unbiased feedback from participants. This setting is available at the account and user level and is enabled by default. - Track webinar emails setting
Account owners and admins can enable the Track webinar emails setting, allowing specified email addresses to receive a copy of webinar emails sent from the system to webinar participants. This feature ensures that a copy of all types of Zoom-generated Webinar emails, including panelist invitations, panelist reminder emails, attendee registration confirmations, attendee reminder emails, and post-event follow-ups and absentee emails, are captured and sent to the designated email address(es) specified by an account admin. - Customer test accounts
Account owners and admins can manage a test account, which is a separate account to test configuration items such as new feature enablement, without impacting production users, settings, or behavior. Customer test accounts include 10% of the production license quantity and are a copy of a production account’s base licensing configuration. This feature is available to Zoom One Business Plus, Zoom One Enterprise Essentials, Zoom One Enterprise Plus, Zoom One for Education Enterprise Essentials, and Zoom One for Education Enterprise Plus accounts, and must be provisioned through their dedicated Zoom Account Executive. This feature will not be immediately available, as it is dependent on a backend server update currently scheduled for March 25, 2024. - Dynamic emoji reactions for video tiles: Admin control
Admins can control the use of new, more dynamic meeting reactions that appear and float up and around the user in their video tile, either in gallery or speaker views. This provides a greater visual indication of other video participant’s reactions for the presenter or speaker. These reactions only appear for video-on participants and can be selected separately through the in-meeting Reactions settings. This can be controlled through the Allow participants to use floating emojis sub-setting under the Meeting Reactions setting, available at the account, group, and user level settings pages.
- User features
- Meeting Summary next-steps moved to the top
The next steps provided as part of the meeting summary are moved to the top of the summary under quick recap, allowing viewers to get the most out of their meeting summary as quickly as possible. Previously, next steps were provided at the end of the summary.
- Expanded access for Meeting Coaching metrics
When viewing the cloud recording, authenticated participants are also able to see their own conversational metrics. Previously, this was only available for the host of the meeting. Additionally, account admins viewing cloud recordings through Recording Management are able to view both the host and participants’ metrics. - Customized waiting room for Webinars
Hosts can customize the waiting room experience for webinars, allowing customization of the image, text, and other waiting room assets that attendees see before joining each session and providing a more engaging and branded joining experience for attendees. These custom assets can be saved to webinar templates for reuse. Account admins can set defaults for the account, as well as control a sub-setting that allows users to customize their webinar waiting rooms with their own uploaded image or video. This feature and its associated backend architecture will be rolling out to accounts over the next months. - Q&A upvotes included in Q&A report
If upvoting is allowed for Q&A and users indeed upvote submitted questions, the count of upvotes for each question will be included in the Q&A reports available afterwards. This will be available immediately for meeting reports. For webinars, this feature must be enabled by Zoom, the same as the View Webinar Q&A submissions from before joining feature mentioned in the February release, and when enabled, applies to all webinars on the account and requires all hosts and attendees to join with Zoom app version 5.17.0 or higher.
Resolved issues
- Minor bug fixes
- Resolved an issue in the List Meeting Participants API where two distinct users were incorrectly assigned the same user_id for the same meeting
- Resolved an issue where, while customizing a recording disclaimer, a specific section consistently stayed in English, regardless of the selected language
- Resolved an issue with the Web portal account settings where the shortcuts on the left side inconsistently functioned across different tabs, such as Meetings, AI Companion, and Team Chat
- Resolved an issue where users were unable to complete the setup of their calendar and contacts integration with Zoom
- Resolved an issue where users on Zoom mobile app were unable to add and edit polls
- Resolved an issue where a user encountered persistent login failures despite repeated attempts to use OTP codes received via email
Note: The Retention policies for Meeting Summaries and Remote control usage report features have been pulled from the release due to issues with deployment and will be available in another upcoming release.
Changes to existing features
- End of support for Windows 7 and Windows 8
Zoom is ending support for Windows 7 and Windows 8. Future releases will no longer prompt the user to update if they are running on either of those platforms. - End-of-support for VDI clients on 32-bit devices
With the 5.17.10 release, currently scheduled for March 2024, this will be the last version to support VDI clients on 32-bit devices. VDI plugins will not yet be affected, but end-of-support for VDI plugins is planned for much later in 2024, although no exact date has been set yet. Lower VDI client versions will be unaffected and continue to support 32-bit devices until they succumb to a future quarterly lifecycle enforcement. - End-of-support for VDI on Ubuntu 16
With the upcoming 5.17.10 release, currently scheduled for March 2024, Zoom will be ending support for Ubuntu version 16. Devices still running Ubuntu 16 will need to update to a higher Ubuntu version, or otherwise will have version 5.17.10 (or a later EP of this branch) as the last available version for install or update.
New and enhanced features
- General features
- ChromeOS VDI optimization for Citrix Workspace
Admins can configure managed ChromeOS devices through the Google Admin console to provide VDI optimization with Citrix virtual desktops. VDI Plugins are provisioned to the Chromebook by adding a policy for the managed device. Learn more about configuring Zoom VDI for ChromeOS. - WSP for Amazon Workspaces
This release adds support for WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP) for Amazon WorkSpaces, and NICE DCV protocol for Amazon AppStream (Desktop View) and any other remote desktop product that uses NICE DCV. Both client and VDI Plugin must be updated for VDI optimization to work with the WSP or NICE DCV. Learn more about configuring WSP. - VDI Plugin Management application for Windows
With this release, a separate application is installed by default for the Windows VDI Plugin Management package. Installation of the application is enabled by default when installing the latest VDI Plugin, but it can also be downloaded and installed separately from the VDI Plugin Management page. - Plugin Management opt-out policy
Admins can choose to provide an option for users to stop being prompted for available VDI Plugin updates. Both the VDI client and VDI Plugin Management will need to be updated before enabling the VDIPluginOptOut policy, which will modify the VDI Plugin update dialog with an Opt Out option, which disables VDI Plugin update notifications. These notifications can be re-enabled through the VDI Plugin Management application. - VDI policy options for Zoom Device Management
For customers adding virtual desktops to Zoom Device Management, VDI-specific policies have been added to ZDM. Refer to the VDI section of the ZDM article for more information about what is supported and the requirements for VDI. This feature is dependent on a backend server update, currently scheduled for March 22, 2024. - Alternate storage location for VDI client updates through ZDM
Admins using Zoom Device Management can configure an alternate location to download and install Zoom Meeting client updates for VDI.
- Meeting/webinar features
- Dual Screen mode
The Use dual monitors option under General settings has been implemented for VDI. Enabling this option will show participants’ video and screen shared content on separate screens for thin clients that can support the feature. Note: There are known issues related to annotation with multi-share, which vary slightly by platform and are already being investigated for a resolution. - Join from room auto-proximity detection
The option to connect to a nearby Zoom Room using auto-proximity detection has been added to the VDI plugin. Users in a Zoom Room with a personal device running the VDI plugin will be able to use the Join from room option to detect and connect to the Zoom Room. For more information about how to use ultrasonic sound proximity detection. - Annotation toolbar updates
Updates made for the annotation toolbar on the 5.16.0 standard client release have been enabled on the VDI client and will be available when connecting to the VDI client with a VDI plugin version 5.17.10 or higher.
Resolved issues
- General fixes
- Hide Huddles tab from Settings
The configuration options for Zoom Huddles have been removed when using the Zom VDI client with an optimized virtual desktop, as the feature is not currently supported for VDI and Huddles is still in limited beta. - Hide download progress for VDI Plugin Management
When clicking the Later option to install a VDI Plugin update, the download bar of the VDI plugin to install later is hidden. - Audio connection status incorrectly displaying pronouns
An issue was reported where a participant connecting only with audio was incorrectly displaying pronouns. The issue was reported in version 5.17.5. - Notifications conflicts when requiring virtual backgrounds
An issue was reported where notifications when trying to start video were not properly displayed if a virtual background was required by the administrator but the user’s configuration or computer did not support virtual backgrounds. - Bandwidth Limits option “Do not receive video” not applied
The admin option to limit bandwidth usage and, when in the configured range, disable incoming video was not being correctly applied to the VDI Plugin. This issue has been corrected and was reported in version 5.13.10.
- Zoom Phone fixes
- No audio for Zoom Phone when using 4G cellular
An issue was reported where Zoom Phone was unable to connect to audio for devices with a built-in 4G SIM card. The problem was reported in version 5.16.10.
- Windows fixes
- Loss of WMI when updating from 32 to 64-bit VDI Plugin
An issue was reported where installing a new 64-bit release of the VDI Plugin over an existing 32-bit VDI Plugin instead removed and did not reinstall WMI for the new plugin. The issue was reported in version 5.16.10. - Turn video on after unlocking a thin client with an avatar
An issue was found where a participant’s video was not being re-enabled if they were using an avatar for their video and then locked-and-unlocked their thin client during a meeting. This issue was reported in version 5.12.0. - Open required ports during installation
Firewall rules for required ports are now included in the Universal Plugin installer to address warnings that could be displayed when running Zoom after the installation. - Hide download progress during VDI Plugin update
The download progress indication displayed when users clicked the Later option to install a VDI Plugin update is no longer displayed by default.
- Linux fixes
- Play sound for share session when ShareOffload is disabled
An issue was reported where the ShareOffload policy was disabled and the virtual desktop did not forward the audio from the share session to the VDI Plugin as expected. This issue affected all previous VDI plugin versions. - Do not prompt to stop recording when pausing record
An issue was reported where pausing a recording using an Azure/Windows 365 virtual desktop, the user was unexpectedly prompted to stop the recording. The prompt has been removed and the issue was reported in version 5.17.5.
- HP Anyware fixes
- Miscellaneous fixes
An issue was reported where the logic when disconnecting and reconnecting to the virtual desktop could result in flickering and other issues.
Changes to existing features
- Improved error message when attempting to join a Zoom for Government meeting
When attempting to join a Zoom for Government (ZfG) meeting via the Commercial CRC gateway, participants will be presented with instructions on how to join via the ZfG CRC gateway instead.
Resolved issues
- Minor bug fixes
- Security enhancements
- Resolved an issue where Cisco devices were unable to send audio after resuming a call that was on hold.
- Resolved an issue where H.323 devices experienced dropped audio during a meeting.