Virtual Venue Zoom integration and attendee experience

This article is part of a series of Virtual Venue articles used as a guide for setting up a virtual event. Start here to see all articles.

There are 2 options for using the ePly & Zoom integration: With or without Virtual Venue.

When using the integration without Virtual Venue, ePly form registrants are also registered in Zoom at the time of submitting* an ePly form. They then receive standard emails from Zoom with direct meeting/webinar join information in additional to any ePly emails setup to be sent to registrants upon submitting a form e.g. the form confirmation.

When using the integration with Virtual Venue, ePly form registrants are not registered in Zoom at the time of submitting* an ePly form and do not receive emails from Zoom with direct join information. This is to prevent registrants from joining the event outside of logging into the venue site.

*MemberClicks AMS customers: We recommend using your AMS to collect registrations and sync them to an ePly form.

Before using either option, review our main Zoom integration article here and complete the Create a Zoom Marketplace JWT App section to add 2 Zoom API settings to your ePly account page.

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Zoom Attendee Experience 

Using Zoom in Virtual Venue is different from using Zoom through their standard desktop application or mobile app. ePly uses Zoom’s web client version (Web SDK) in order to embed meetings and webinars in Virtual Venue sessions. At this time, Zoom does not support all of their features in their web client.

Zoom is in control of their development, feature support and product availability. Please refer to their documentation for detailed information and the latest updates about their web client.

1. Specific Zoom feature details, see the web client column of this Zoom help article: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360027397692-Desktop-client-mobile-app-and-web-client-comparison  If you want to use a feature that is not available in Zoom's web client, you can include the direct Zoom join link for your attendees to launch the Zoom desktop application instead of embedding Zoom in the session to display on the venue site. An example of this is provided in the next help article in the series.
   Note to early Virtual Venue adopters: Zoom Meeting Gallery View(limited to 9 at a time) Meeting breakout rooms and Webinar Polling features are now supported.
2. General browser support, computer and mobile. See the Browser Support section: https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/web
   We recommend attendees use the Chrome web browser on a desktop to access a venue site. Chrome (PCs & MACs) is fully supported by Zoom. For the most part, Firefox, Safari & Edge are supported by Zoom but there are a few miscellaneous limitations so we recommend Chrome and that users are on the latest version. IE is not fully supported by Zoom.

   Virtual Venue is not mobile compatible. You can log into a venue site from an iPhone or iPad and join a meeting/webinar but audio cannot be heard. Zoom has no audio issues on Android devices but because of their limitation for iOS devices we say Virtual Venue is not mobile compatible.

3. Subscribe to Zoom's status alerts to stay aware of any future outages. Specifically, the Web SDK under the Zoom Developer Platform section. https://status.zoom.us/

Virtual Venue is intended for attendee access to Zoom meetings/webinars. Hosts and speakers should join directly through the Zoom desktop application and not through the venue site. This is to provide a familiar Zoom presenting experience and supports hosts and speakers in having stable connections in Zoom. A poor host/speaker connection in Zoom results in poor audio and video issues for attendees. Note that hosts and speakers can simultaneously join as attendees in a venue site but it may result in a poor connection.

Zoom meetings/webinars embedded on websites like we do for Virtual Venue can be computer resource heavy on some computers depending on their age, processing power & available system memory. Zoom meetings are more computer resource heavy than webinars in part because attendees do not have access to enable their audio or video with webinars. We suggest using webinars when possible provided you have sufficient Zoom webinar licensing and that webinars provide the attendee experience you want to provide during your event.

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At this time we do not offer a built-in integration to any other video conferencing provider besides Zoom but other video conferencing solution may still work if they can be embedded in HTML.