How to Stay in Touch with people

During these uncertain times it is especially important to stay in touch with our friends and family, we thought it would be useful to share a quick tutorial on how to use zoom it is really as simple as creating an account, signing in and hosting a meeting. Below we have gone into a bit more detail including screen shots.

Contents

1. What is the zoom service
2. What do I need to run zoom.
3. Setting up zoom for use.

1.What is zoom

Zoom is a web-based video conferencing tool with a local, desktop client and a mobile app that allows users to meet online, with or without video.

2.What do I need to run zoom.

First requirement you need is an internet connection – broadband wired or wireless (3G or 4G/LTE). Minimum bandwidth is 600kbps (up/down) and recommended is 1.5 Mbps (up/down). Check your Internet bandwidth using  a Speedtest.

For hardware zoom can run on most devices i.e. pc, tablets and phones etc., but they will need Speakers and a microphone – built-in or USB plug-in or wireless Bluetooth and a webcam or HD webcam - built-in or USB plug-in for a more complete list of supported devices and software please check out this zoom support page.

3.Setting up zoom for use

Setting up zoom is easy the first thing you need to do is go zoom.us and sign up to create account.

After you have created your account, you are now ready to start using zoom. First you need to sign in.

Next you need to host your meeting and invite participants

After clicking the 'host a meeting link', software will be automatically download and launch on your Mac or PC, don't worry if it doesn't download or open it is also possible to run the meeting in your internet browser. You may receive security warnings about zoom trying to access your microphone and camera, if you receive these warnings you need to allow zoom to access these devices. 

Make sure that you join meeting with audio, once you have started your meeting you can invite people to join using the invite button at the bottom of the screen. Then select the method of inviting people, in this case we are using default email application.

Please note; It is also possible to schedule meetings for a specific date and invite participants, we will add details of this at a later stage.

If you selected the default mail method like this example, your email program should launch. You can then email your meeting participants, and all they need to do is click on the link on the email to join.

Well that's it so far, we will be creating another article shortly for scheduling meetings and using the app on mobile devices.

We hope this is useful, please free to ask questions in the comments below. They will all get answered when we get the chance.