While Zoom Meetings can host up to 1000 attendees, when creating Zoom meetings for Town Halls and large meetings, DoIT advises the following meeting settings:

1. Zoom Setup Before the Session 

The following options can be found when creating a Zoom meeting in Calendar or when scheduling a meeting in the Zoom portal:  https://stonybrook.zoom.us/meeting/schedule

• Allow Only Authenticated Users to Join if your audience will be with Stony Brook staff, faculty and students (i.e. those with out a stonybrook.edu or stonybrookmedicine.edu email addresses)
  • For non-Stony Brook attendees or a mix of Stony Brook and non-Stony Brook attendees:
    • Use Google Forms or Qualtrics to register participants ahead of time.  And then provide the registrants with a Zoom meeting information
    • *Make Registration - Required 
• Enable the Waiting Room - Hosts, Alternative Hosts and Co-Hosts can be assign the duty of letting all attendees into the meeting with one click and then monitor the waiting room to allow latercomers, again with one-click.
• Do not check off Enable Join Before Host.  This will all hosts to set up prior to meeting.  If you wanted attendees to be able to test to see if they can get into a meeting Zoom has a Test Meeting here:  https://zoom.us/test

Zoom Settings Screenshot for you to reference. 

2.  Hosts:  Setup your Zoom Meeting Window Before the Participants Enter 

For an optimal experience, install and sign into the Zoom app and make sure your Zoom app is updated.

This video demonstrates the Security button, getting the chat on the right side of the screen so you can read the questions during the presentation, Muting Participants, and Disabling Annotations when sharing your screen.

• Mute Particpants Upon Entry - Hosts , Alternative Hosts and Co-Hosts can should know that participants can unmute themselves.  To prevent participants from unmutting themselves permanently, in the Zoom session click Security > uncheck Unmute Themselves.  Also, Prevent Share Screen if it is not already unchecked during the session.
  
  Or in the Participants window, Host, Alternative Hosts and Co-Hosts can click Mute All > uncheck Allow Participants to Unmute Themselves
  
• If the session is being recorded the Host should ensure Speaker View is clicked if you are not sharing a screen.  This will ensure that only the Speaker's video is recorded and not participant's video. 
  
  *If you are sharing a screen and have participants muted, their video will not be recorded.
  *Learn more about Recording Layouts.
• When sharing a screen, click More > Disable Annotations for Others