Using direct links to 1:1 chats for an online fair

Feature Requests
1

Hello everyone,

I apologize in advance for putting this question here, as well as the nature of this support request, but this is a very spontaneous request by our customer, and, frankly, we’ve had no first-hand experience with Zoom ourselves yet and I myself am not entirely sure where else to put this question, as my support requests are instantly set to “solved”.

An enterprise customer has asked us if we could set up an online “reception” for his online fair.
Ideally, they’d have a button on the web-page of the fair which directs them to a private 1:1 chat of the “receptionist” via the invite link of his private meeting.

Generally speaking, is this possible?
If yes, what would happen if multiple people were to click on this link, would they be put in a queue of sorts, would another, different 1:1 instance open for the “receptionist”, would they all end up in the same room?

Following this, the receptionist would have to direct questions to certain professionals of the event, could he add them to the current 1:1 meeting (and perhaps leave the room), or would he have to re-direct the user via another link to a meeting?

Big thanks in advance.

Kind Regards,
Nico Stefan Müller
n.mueller@ew-it.de
E&W Consulting GmbH & Co. KG, 51702 Bergneustadt
Junior Consultant

2

This is a pretty cool use case.

While I don’t work for Zoom, I’ve been working with the SDK for a bit and here is how I would tackle this issue.

There are two ways of doing this. One is dependent solely on Zoom (but in my opinion doesn’t provide the best user experience), while the other requires you to do some more leg work.

Full Zoom Way

In the first instance, you can have a preliminary Zoom meeting with a waiting room enabled. The receptionist can be in that Zoom meeting and let in users 1 at a time.

Each of the professionals can have their own meetings with waiting rooms, and the receptionist can direct the user to their rooms. They can keep track of the meeting statuses using Slack or any other IM service. The professionals would then let in users 1 at a time, and they can also send a message to waiting room participants about the wait etc.

Integration way

You would need to build a portal for professionals (or you can use a slack channel, but this would make it more seamless) where they can receiving incoming meeting request.

The receptionist can create meetings on their behalf, and once a meeting is created using the meeting API, the “start_url” property value can be sent to the professional, and the “join_url” property of the meeting can be sent to the participant.

For example, the receptionist can have a form where they choose the professional, choose the email of the participant, and schedule the meeting. The professional receives a ping / notification with a link to start the meeting, while the participant receives a link in their email to join the meeting. The receptionist could also just share the join_url in the chat as well.

You can automate as much or as little of this as you want. There are lots of ways of doing this.

So yes, this is definitely possible. :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Hmm, that’s a splendid answer so far. But I guess this also means we won’t get around buying (at least) the Pro license for Zoom Meetings for a month, am I wrong on this?

4

You’d need the pro license simply to schedule the meetings. So depending on how many concurrent meetings you’d have in a given time, that’s how many licenses you’d need.