Webex - Best Practices for Hosting a Webex Meeting and Webinar

As a host, you’re the final decision maker concerning the security settings of your meetings, events, webinars, and training sessions. You control nearly every aspect of the meeting, event, webinar, or training session, including when it begins and ends.

Keep your meetings and information secure. Know and follow the security policies for your organization. Follow security best practices when you schedule a meeting, during a meeting, and after a meeting.

Don’t publish passwords to publicly accessible websites. Don’t share your Audio PIN with anyone. Provide meeting passwords only to users who need them. Never share sensitive information in your meeting until you’re certain who is in attendance.

Scheduling the Meeting

Assign a cohost or an alternate host

Assign a cohost to start and control the meeting, webinar, event, or training session (alternate host). This practice keeps meetings, webinars, events, and training sessions more secure by eliminating the possibility that the host role is assigned to an unexpected, or unauthorized, attendee, in case you inadvertently lose your connection to the meeting.

When inviting attendees to a scheduled meeting, you can designate one or more attendees as cohosts for the meeting. A cohost can start the meeting and act as the host. Thus, a cohost must have a user account on your Webex Meetings website. You can assign a cohost when scheduling your meeting with the Webex Meetings integration to Microsoft Outlook.

Choose the meeting topic carefully

A listed meeting or a forwarded invitation email could, at a minimum, reveal the meeting titles to unintended audiences. Meeting titles can unintentionally reveal private information. To minimize exposure of sensitive data, such as company names or events, carefully word meeting titles.

Prevent guests from joining unlocked meetings

When this setting is enabled, all attendees must have a user account on your site and be signed in to attend the meeting. Attendees who join by phone without an Attendee ID automatically get placed in the lobby. For information about how attendees can obtain a user account, ask your site administrator.

To enable this setting, when you schedule a meeting, select Advanced options, and under Unlocked meetings, select Guests can't join the meeting.

Require invitees to register for your meeting, event, or training session

You can require your invitees to register for your meeting, webinar, event, or training session before they join. This lets you secure meeting information and track and gather information on the invitees who plan to attend your meeting, event, or training session.

This feature is enabled during scheduling. To enable this setting in Webex Meetings and Webex Webinars, go to Advanced options, and under Registration select Require attendee registration.

Restrict available features

Limit the available features, such as chat and audio, if you allow attendees to join the meeting, webinar, event, or training session before the host.

Request that invitees not forward invitations

Request that your invitees do not forward the invitation further, especially for confidential meetings.

During the Meeting

Restrict access to the meeting

Lock the meeting, webinar, event, or training session after all attendees have joined. This prevents more attendees from joining. Hosts can lock or unlock the meeting, webinar, event, or training session while the session is in progress. To lock a meeting that you're currently hosting, click , then click the slider next to Lock Meeting.

This option prevents anyone from automatically joining the meeting, webinar, event, or training session. To unlock a meeting that you're currently hosting, click , then click the slider next to Lock Meeting.

Remove a participant from the meeting

You can expel participants at any time during a meeting. Select the name of the participant whom you want to remove, and then click Participant > Expel.

Share an application, not your screen

When you select Share, you can choose to share an application instead of your screen. Sharing an application rather than your screen helps to prevent accidental exposure of sensitive information.

Control who can share

If allowed at the site level, hosts can choose whether to allow all participants to share. If you don't enable the option, you can assign the presenter role to select participants or attendees.

Only designated presenters can share content from video devices and the Webex App app.

End the meeting

When the meeting, event, or training session is over, be sure to end it for all participants. A dialog may open to provide you the option to leave the meeting, webinar, event, or training session running without ending it. If you need to leave early, make someone else the host so they can be responsible for ending the meeting, event, or training session.

After the Meeting

Assign passwords to recordings

We recommend that you don't create recordings that contain sensitive information.

If you create recordings, you can edit the recordings and add passwords before sharing them to keep the information secure. Password-protected recordings require recipients to have the password in order to view them.

1. 1. To assign passwords to recordings, go to Recordings > More > Share.

2. 2. On the Share Recording Window, check the check box next to Public Link.

3. 3. Check the check box next to Password protection, and then type the password in the text field.

4. 4. Click Save.

Delete recordings

Delete recordings after they are no longer relevant.

1. 1. Go to Recordings, then select More on the recording.

2. 2. Click Delete, then click Delete again.