Don't be late to your meetings: New Zoom tool can track attendance status

Zoom meetings will now have a feature called "Attendance Status," which makes it easier for hosts to track whether participants joined the meeting and whether anyone arrived late.

Participants invited to a meeting who have not yet joined will be singled out under a new "Not Joined" section in the Participants panel, along with their calendar response (Accepted, Declined, Maybe, No response).

The host can click "Ask to join," which will invite the missing people by calling them into the current meeting or choose "Chat," which will begin composing a message to that contact through Zoom chat.

The attendance tracker is available to people with Google and Outlook calendar integrations, and the feature is currently in beta testing.

Certain limitations for this tool exist, such as the meeting cannot be recurring, and the meeting has to be scheduled after the tool has rolled out to include the integration. It also only works with a maximum of 200 attendees.

Zoom-bombing lawsuit: California church files class action lawsuit against Zoom after bible class 'Zoombombing'

Zoom announced the change in a blog post on Tuesday, along with several other feature changes.

Enhanced slide control allows multiple people to control the movement of slides in a presentation. Polls now have more options, including ranked responses, matching, short and long answers and fill in the blank.

While Zoom skyrocketed in popularity as more people work from home, the video conferencing tool faced criticism over how well it secures calls after a string of "Zoom bombings," where outside users would invade and disrupt calls. 

A California church filed a class-action lawsuit against Zoom after its virtual Bible study class was "Zoom bombed" with inappropriate images.

Zoom has since introduced a variety of security features to better protect video calls, including a tougher form of encryption called AES 256 GCM encryption for all users.

Contributing: Brett Molina

You can follow the author @michelle_shen10 on Twitter.