New Webinar features for Web SDK 1.8.0

Distance Learning

As the world turns to Zoom to keep the everyone connected, schools are back in session and are looking for new ways to host classes virtually. Our Web SDK is introducing new webinar features that you love, so that teachers can run their virtual classrooms as a webinar from start to finish within the Web SDK.

Within this blog were highlighting the new features that were recently released in the 1.8.0 version of the WebSDK.

• Host the Webinar — Users can now start & host webinars within the WebSDK.
• Ask Questions — Host can enable Q&A within the WebSDK for attendees to ask questions, upvote or make comments during the webinar.

Q&A feature

• Allow attendees to speak — Host can enable the allow to talk feature for attendees to talk to ask questions during the webinar.
• Promote to a Panelist — Panelist can now join webinars. In addition, the webinar host can promote attendees to panelist and set the panelist as an attendee.

Promote attendee Jerry to a Panelist (1)

Promote attendee Jerry to a Panelist (2)

• Add a Co-host — Meeting host can add attendees as a co-host to help manage meetings.
• Chat with everyone — Now attendees, panelists, host can all chat with each other or send private messages to one another.

Chat with panelist and attendees

• Registration — Attendees and Panelists can now join registered enabled webinars. When they access the webinar, a dialog will show, prompting the user to enter in their user information before joining the webinar.

Webinar Registration screen(1)

Webinar Registration screen(2)

• Multiple Screen Shares — Host can enable multiple participants to share their screen simultaneously. Support Article

Host enabling Multiple participants can screen share simultaneously

SIMD Support — Web SDK 1.8.0 is currently experimenting with new technology to improve the performance & usage for meetings by supporting SIMD for Chrome 84+. Currently, this is in Trial mode and below are the steps to Register for WebAssembly SIMD Trial to be used in your Web SDK application. If you’re unfamiliar with Chrome’s Origin trials, you can visit this Getting started onChrome’s origins trials article.

1. To apply for a SIMD trail, go to the Chrome Original Trials website — https://developers.chrome.com/origintrials/#/trials/active
2. Locate WebAssembly SIMD and click Register.

3. Fill in your domain that your WebSDK will be hosted on, agree to the terms and click Register.

4. Add the the token to your application using the meta tag.

<meta http-equiv="origin-trial" content="TOKEN_GOES_HERE">

5. To confirm that SIMD is working within your application, please check your developer console to see if SIMD check is set to true.

For full details about the features, fixes, and enhancements from the 1.8.0 release, please visit the latest Web SDK change log page .

If you’re excited about all the new features with our WebSDK, you can get started right away by finding the latest Web SDK version in the following locations:

1. NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zoomus/websdk
2. Sample Web App repo: https://github.com/zoom/sample-app-web
3. Angular Sample App repo: https://github.com/zoom/websdk-sample-angular

We have a lot more features coming soon for the Web SDK on our Zoom Developer roadmap, so stay tuned and #codeHappy!