Zoom webinars. Keeping track of who has joined

Zoom webinars.

Controlling

the participants

who join.

Probably everyone who runs webinars, especially paid ones, has faced the problem of the link being passed on to people who were not invited to the event. The question comes up: “Can participants be controlled? How do you make sure that only those who have paid can join?” Yes, this is possible, and now we will explain how.

Zoom has a built-in mechanism for controlling webinar participants. You need to make registration mandatory, then review the registration forms and manually send participants an invitation to the Zoom webinar. You can read more about this here.
The drawback of this mechanism is that it is not clear how to identify the person who has paid, especially when it comes to hundreds or even thousands of participants.

Now let's talk about a working solution that will settle this question once and for all. Before we start, let me note that we can always create a webinar for you with control over the participants who join. And now let's look at the diagram and work out how to implement it.

The overall logic is as follows:

• Registration for your event goes through Zoom, your website, Instagram or any other way — it does not matter. In the end you should have a list of the e-mail addresses of all the participants.
• Next, accounts (the participant's e-mail address + a password) are created for all these participants on an SSO server. We will talk about this in more detail a little later.
• When you create the webinar, you need to specify that only users authorized via SSO can join. That is, only the people for whom we have created accounts.
• On the SSO server you configure the allowed number of sessions per participant. In our case it is one session.
• We send the account details to all the participants at their e-mail addresses.

Then, on the day of the event, all participants follow the usual Zoom link and are asked to sign in. Everyone enters their personal credentials and gets into the Zoom webinar. And if a participant decides to share the link with the person next to them, that person will not be able to join, because there is already a session on this account. That's it, the end, the problem is solved.

A few technical details. The most convenient SSO server to use is keycloak. It is an OpenSource solution, i. e. you do not have to pay for it. We will create the accounts on this same server. You can do it by hand, through the API, or you can set up integration with AD or other directory services. Next we need to configure the integration of this SSO server with your Zoom account (the Business plan at minimum is required).

The next step is creating the webinar with the right settings, namely admitting only users authorized on the SSO server that we have just integrated.

That's all, everything is now under control. If that does not seem enough, all of this can be automated, so that people even receive personal payment links and only receive their credentials (login/password) after payment.

If this topic is of interest and/or you need help, write to us.