This new tool automatically rats out tardy Zoom attendees.
The popular remote work tool and video conferencing platform Zoom is rolling out a series of fresh features, including one which will make it a lot more difficult to subtly enter a meeting late.
“Attendance Status” promises to “streamline the start of your Zoom” meetings by allowing hosts and co-hosts to see whether people have accepted or declined their meeting invite and to see whether they have joined, according to a blog post by Zoom first reported by TechRadar.
The names of meeting invitees who haven’t yet joined will be clearly listed together in a “Not Joined” section along with whether they RSVP’d that they’d attend or not.
For those who log in from a different account than the one they accepted the Zoom invite from, “they will be listed under both Not Joined and Joined categories,” a Zoom support page clarifies.
The feature syncs with hosts’ Google and Outlook calendars and is currently in beta mode.
To add insult to injury for less-than-prompt Zoom attendees, in addition to lateness becoming more easily noticeable, another recent update has invalidated the late excuse of having needed to update the application: The software will now automatically update on both Windows and macOS.
One possible, rather extreme workaround for those who find themselves unprepared for a Zoom meeting that’s about to start may lie in the tool Zoom Escaper. The soundboard, designed by digital artist Sam Lavigne, allows attendees to “self-sabotage” their presence in meetings by playing such annoying background noise that the meeting host will remove them, Gizmodo reported. Certainly not more than a band-aid of a problem-solver for the chronically late, but at least a possible way to buy a few minutes instead of being ratted out by Attendance Status for not entering the call on time.
