Best Practices and Security Tips for Web Conferencing
With the increasing usage of internet-based video conferencing, there are a number of caveats and security concerns you should be thinking about prior to hosting your conference calls online. Weitzman ITS has compiled a list of tips and security concerns for you to consider:
Security Concerns with Web Conferencing
- Don't post your meeting links on open web pages. Only post meeting links on Canvas or send links to your students via your class mailing list.
- Require a meeting password. Adding a password means participants can only join the meeting with the correct password of your choice.
- Add a waiting room. The Waiting Room feature allows the host to control when a participant joins the meeting.
- Lock your meeting. When everyone you’ve invited has successfully joined, you can lock your meeting to keep others from joining.
- Disable "Enable joining before/without host" for Personal Meetings. This prevents others from using your Personal Meeting ID without you.
Manage Participants
- Mute a participant. People often leave their microphones on by mistake, meaning everyone in the meeting can hear their background noise. You can mute participant microphones to stop this from happening or to simply prevent interruptions during a presentation.
- Stop a participant’s video. If a participant’s video is distracting, or you think it’s causing them to have connection issues, you can switch it off for them.
- Remove participants. In the rare event that someone is in your meeting who shouldn’t be, or if you need to remove them for any other reason, hosts can remove a participant and prevent them from being able to rejoin.
Test Internet Speeds and Manage Bandwidth Usage
Internet Speed Testing
Having reliable internet is critical in our increasingly digital age. While wireless internet speeds have improved dramatically, the surefire way to secure top speeds and avoid spotty connections is to go with a direct, ethernet or LAN connection to your home network. Once connected, here are some ways to test the speed of your internet connection:
To ensure you're getting a good connection, you'll want internet speeds of at least 100-200 MB/s for download and 5-20 MB/s for upload. Most internet providers or local WiFi networks hit these speeds; however, if not operating from a private network, you will always be at the whim of local network traffic. This is also the case with greater network traffic or outages (for example, a portion of a town or city all using internet during peak times).
Managing Bandwidth Usage
Forcing all participants to mute their microphone or webcam not only helps avoid confusion during a remote call or class, it also helps drastically reduce internet bandwidth usage. This makes it easier for users with slower or spottier connections to keep up.