Zoomtopia 2021: 7 Zoom Features Coming Soon To A Meeting Near You

From partnerships with Oculus for a virtual reality-based meeting experience, to integrations with third-party collaboration vendors like Cisco Webex and security updates, here are seven Zoom products and features coming to the platform later this year.

Time To Zoom

Zoom Video Communications emerged as an early leader at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that sent employees all over the globe to work from their homes. The videoconferencing leader, despite running into some security challenges 18 months ago, has proven to be adaptable and agile as it focused on bulking up its platform security, while at the same time, prioritized the development of the features that users – both consumers and business users alike – were asking for.

Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan took to the virtual stage at Zoomtopia 2021 to share a slew of new products and features that the company has been working on, from partnerships with Oculus for a virtual reality-based meeting experience, to integrations with third-party collaboration vendors, such as its rival Cisco Webex, to offer a more continuous communication experience for users.

Here are seven new Zoom features and offerings the company announced at Zoomtopia 2021 that will be hitting the market soon.

Zoom Whiteboard

Zoom is making good on its persistent collaboration promise with the introduction of Zoom Whiteboard, a virtual hub that acts as a digital canvas for real-time and asynchronous collaboration. With Whiteboard, teams will be able to create, annotate, and share ideas from any device, whether they’re currently in a Zoom meeting or not. Users on Whiteboard will have access to features such as sticky notes, commenting, and drawing.

The company is planning to offer Zoom Whiteboard in beta later this year.

Zoom Conference

Later this fall, companies using Zoom will have access to a new option within the Zoom Events portfolio: Zoom Conference.

Users that build a conference in Zoom Events will be able to host multi-track and multi-day events with new features, such as branded emails, surveys, recordings, and analytics. Zoom Conference also will let organizers create customizable experiences. Using Conference, businesses can host up to 13 concurrent sessions at once, host an event over five days, stream sessions to the conference lobby, allow attendees to build their itineraries, and showcase sponsors in a more dedicated way, the company said.

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Zoom Phone Video Voicemail

Zoom Phone has taken off in popularity. In fact, the company recently announced it has more than two million paid seats globally, beating out some of the cloud-based voice competitors. Zoom is advancing and bolstering its Phone offering, and to that end, introduced Video Voicemail.

The Video Voicemail feature provides a more “personable” alternative to standard voicemail by giving users the option of leaving video messages for colleagues in their voicemail inbox.

Video Voicemail will be available later this year, executives said.

Oculus Integration

Zoom announced that it is joining forces with Horizon Workrooms, a virtual reality space that is currently in beta, to bring physical and virtual worlds together. The plan is to let users access their Zoom Whiteboard and Zoom Meetings within the virtual Workrooms environment and fully immerse themselves in their Zoom meetings from wherever they are located using Oculus headsets.

The integration is expected to be available early next year.

Zoom BYOK

Currently in the works is a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) offering, which will give customers with strict compliance requirements or data residency needs the ability to provision and manage their own encryption keys. Customers using BYOK will own and manage a key management system (KMS) in AWS, which will contain a customer master key (CMK) that Zoom cannot access or see. Zoom will interact with the customer’s KMS to obtain data keys for encryption and decryption and will use these data keys to encrypt and decrypt customer assets before those assets are written to long-term storage, the company said. The initial beta of BYOK is planned for later this year.

In other security-related news, Zoom plans to extend the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it introduced last year for Zoom Meetings to Zoom Phone. Users will have the option to upgrade to E2EE during one-on-one phone calls that occur via the Zoom client in the coming year, according to the company.

Zoom Chat Huddle View

In an effort to bring back the spontaneous communication that occurs when everyone is in the office, Huddle View, coming soon, will provide a visual layout of different channels aimed at giving teams and employees a sense of connectedness while working virtually. Channel members will potentially be able to choose a unique virtual background of their choice and see who else is in the channel while determining if they are busy or available for a quick chat.

Huddle View will be available in Q4, Zoom said.

Chat Integrations

Speaking of chatting, users have been asking for it and now Zoom will be delivering on integrations with popular third-party chat tools, including with the company’s own competitors: Cisco Webex, Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Zoom Continuous Collaboration will make it easier for users to collaborate across tools by way of tighter integration between the Zoom platform and third parties. Down the line, users will be able to share files, recordings and chats from Zoom Meetings to Zoom Chat for easy reference and collaboration on documents without having to leave the Zoom client, according to the company.