Best Practices for Online Meetings

Keep these best practices* in mind when meeting online:

1. ECU's standard for teleconferencing is Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams. This standard follows NC Department of Information Technology recommendations.
    
2. Auto lock your personal room for secure meetings. This prevents all the attendees in your lobby from automatically joining in the meeting. The host will see a notification when attendees are waiting in the lobby, and as the host, you will authorize the attendees to join.
    
3. Set personal room notifications before a meeting to receive an email notification when attendees are waiting for a meeting to begin. You will then be able to review the participant list and expel any unauthorized attendees.
    
4. Schedule a meeting instead of using your personal room. Personal room web links do not change. Improve security by scheduling a meeting which includes a one-time web link.
    
5. Set a password for every meeting by creating a high-complexity, non-trivial password (a strong password or passphrase). A strong password should include a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. Passwords protect against unauthorized attendance because only users with access to the password are able to join the meeting.
    
6. Do not reuse passwords for meetings. Scheduling meetings with the same passwords weakens meeting protection considerably.
    
7. Use the entry or exit tone or the announce name feature to prevent someone from joining the audio portion of your meeting without your knowledge.
    
8. Do not allow attendees or panelists to join before the host. This setting is set by default by the site administrator for meetings.
    
9. Assign an alternate host to start and control the meeting. This keeps meetings more secure by eliminating the possibility that the host role will be assigned to an unexpected or unauthorized attendee if you inadvertently lose your connection to the meeting. One or more alternate hosts can be chosen when scheduling a meeting. An alternate host can start the meeting and act as the host.
    
10. Lock the meeting once all attendees have joined the meeting. This will prevent additional attendees from joining. Hosts can lock/unlock the meeting at any time while the session is in progress.
     
11. Expel attendees at any time during a meeting.
     
12. Share an application instead of sharing your screen to prevent accidental exposure of sensitive information on your screen (ex. Microsoft Office products, Web browsers, etc.).
     
13. Set passwords for your recordings before sharing them to keep the recording secure. Password-protected recordings require recipients to have the password to view them.
     
14. Delete recordings after they are no longer relevant.
     
15. Create a host audio PIN. Your PIN is the last level of protection preventing unauthorized access to your personal conferencing account. Should a person gain unauthorized access to the host access code for a personal conference meeting (PCN meeting), the conference cannot be started without the audio PIN. Protect your audio PIN, and do not share it.
     
16. Do not click on an email when you don't know the sender, if the email has inconsistencies in grammar and/or spelling, or the email contains web links with which you're unfamiliar.

*Recommended by the NC Department of Information Technology.