Best practices to prevent virtual meeting disruptions at U of T
Published: May 4, 2026
Video conferencing is widely used at the University of Toronto for teaching, learning, and collaboration. To protect participants and reduce disruptions, meeting hosts should take steps to secure their online meetings and prevent unauthorized access. Disruptions can occur in Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other video-conferencing tools when meetings are not properly configured.
The guidance below outlines recommended security settings and best practices for hosting and participating in online meetings. All staff; faculty, librarians and students are encouraged to follow these practices to help keep virtual sessions secure and disruption-free.
Best practices for organizing and attending Zoom meetings
Use your University of Toronto Zoom account
The guidance below outlines recommended security settings and best practices for hosting and participating in online meetings. All staff, faculty, librarians and students are encouraged to follow these practices to help keep virtual sessions secure and disruption-free.
U of T faculty, staff, librarians and students should host meetings using their U of T licensed Zoom account, available at utoronto.zoom.us.
Signing in through the university portal ensures that institutional security settings are applied to your meetings. If you host meetings using a personal Zoom account, be aware that:
- Institutional security settings may not be applied
- Some features available in U of T licensed accounts may be restricted or unavailable
- Meetings may not be covered by university security and privacy protections
If you regularly host meetings for teaching, research or university business, sign in using your U of T Zoom account instead of a personal account.
Best practices for hosting secure Zoom meetings
Set up authentication security options
Within your U of T-licensed Zoom account, hosts can limit registrations so only U of T users can register. This helps reduce the risk of unauthorized access. For meetings intended only for the U of T community, hosts can require participants to sign in with a U of T account before joining.
For more information about authentication, refer to UTM Knowledge Base article KB0011016: Enable or disable Only authenticated users can join meetings.
Use Zoom Webinar to limit interaction options
If you are hosting a virtual gathering that is open to people outside the U of T community, consider hosting a Zoom Webinar instead. This limits participant interactions to the chat function.
Webinars provide additional controls by:
- Restricting attendee audio and video
- Limiting screen sharing
- Allowing hosts and panelists to manage interaction
Password-protect your meeting
Once the registration period has closed, the host can create a meeting password and provide it only to registered participants. However, if the invitation email is forwarded, anyone with the password may be able to join the meeting.
Enable the waiting room
This feature allows the host to control who can enter the meeting and to decide who can automatically bypass the waiting room. For more details, refer to KB0010938: Ways to secure your Zoom meeting.
Suspend participant activities when needed
Hosts can enable or disable participant audio, video and screen-sharing settings, both either during the meeting or when initially scheduling it. If immediate action is required, hosts can click Suspend Participant Activities to disable all video, audio, in-meeting chat, annotation, screen sharing and recording.
Assign co-hosts
Assign trusted colleagues as co-hosts to help monitor chat and video and remove unwanted participants. Establish a plan for co-host to alert the host if the meeting needs to end immediately.
Remove unwanted participants
From the Participants menu, hosts can hover over a participant’s name, and several options will appear, including Remove.
All the features above can be enabled or disabled through the Settings menu in your Zoom web profile.
All the features above can be enabled/disabled through the Settings menu of your profile on the web client.
Support
Students: If you need clarification about this guidance or require technical assistance after experiencing a virtual meeting disruption, please contact the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation’s Student Support team at q.help@utoronto.ca.
If you have concerns for your personal safety following a virtual meeting incident, contact the Community Safety Office at community.safety@utoronto.ca.
Microsoft Teams meetings
Many of the same principles outlined above apply when hosting meetings in Microsoft Teams, although the settings and controls are platform-specific.
Hosts can improve meeting security by:
For MS Teams-specific guidance, see the following Knowledge Base articles:
Support
If you have concerns for your personal safety following a Microsoft Teams meeting disruption, please contact your local IT help desk.
