Communications

How To Share A Recorded Zoom Meeting Securely

April 20, 2020

With more collaboration taking place over Zoom today, you might be wondering how to record your Zoom meetings so you have an easy way to revisit important conversations, decisions, action items, and more.

If you’re the meeting host, you can simply press record in Zoom. If you’re not the meeting host, you can still record Zoom meetings with a free screen recorder.

After you record a Zoom meeting, you might want to share it with your colleagues who attended, or perhaps those who couldn’t make it. And you’ve probably got a few questions, such as:

How do I locate my Zoom recording?
Can I email a Zoom recording to people?
Do I need to upload it somewhere else to share it?
Will they need to download the recording?
How do I make sure it’s shared securely?

The answers differ depending on whether you are sharing a Local Recording or a Cloud Recording. Free Zoom accounts will only have the ability to record to a local computer, while paid Zoom subscriptions will have cloud recording automatically enabled.

We walk you through both ways to share Zoom meeting recordings below — and then show you another solution for sharing Zoom recordings that automates many of the steps required for sharing videos, making it easier for everyone at your organization to share important information efficiently simply by clicking record at the start of a Zoom meeting.

How to Share a Local Zoom Recording

With Zoom’s Local Recording, you’ll need to locate the video file that saved to your computer and upload it for sharing. This is what your workflow looks like:

Step 1: Find your meeting recordings through your Zoom client: Go to Meetings, then click the Recorded tab.
Step 2: Select the meeting you want to share and click Open, to open the folder where your video file (mp4) is saved on your computer.
Step 3: Upload the mp4 to a cloud storage or video streaming site, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or YouTube.
Step 4: Ensure your video is unshared or stored in a private folder, consider adding password protection, and share the link with your colleagues, who will either download the mp4 or stream the video depending on the service you used to host it.

How to Share a Zoom Cloud Recording

If you or your organization has a Zoom subscription that includes Cloud Recording, you can skip the uploading step and share directly from the Zoom cloud — but you’ll still need to check your privacy settings.

Step 1: Log into your Zoom account and select Recordings on the right side of the screen.
Step 2: Click Share… next to the recording you want to share and then click the button next to “Internally” (as shown in the adjacent image) so the video isn’t publicly available. For extra protection, you can also add a password.
Step 3: Copy the Zoom cloud recording link and paste it into an email or your corporate messaging app to share it with your colleague(s).

There has to be an easier way, right?

These are both fairly reasonable processes if you’re occasionally recording and sharing Zoom sessions. Though these workflows start to eat up a lot of productive time as they are done more frequently, or as they happen more often across an entire organization.

A recent survey conducted by Panopto and the Project Management Institute showed that 30% of people already record their meetings. That’s a rather significant number of meeting videos being produced — in a company with 1,000 employees, 30% of people recording just one of their meetings a week will generate 300 meeting recordings every week. With many more teams now working fully remotely and people also working around other pandemic-related disruptions at home, even more meetings are being recorded and shared to support the continuity of work in this new environment.

After the Meeting Ends

Just as live video conferencing supports real-time productivity and collaboration, recording and sharing those virtual meetings similarly supports productivity and collaboration after the meeting ends — far better than notes or anyone’s memory of the meeting could.

But meeting recordings need to be easy to find, easy to share, easy to watch, and easy to search so that people within your organization can access the information archived inside as efficiently as possible. With Zoom, alone, the most efficient post-meeting workflows that support productivity and collaboration can’t be fully automated. And its search features only allow you to search within your personal library of meeting recordings.

All of that sensitive business information inside your meeting recordings still has to be secured, too. Zoom does allow you to restrict sharing only to users within your organization, but you may not want everyone to have viewing permissions enabled for some meeting recordings. What’s more, hosting and sharing cloud recordings through Zoom does present some risk, and may not meet the security requirements of every organization.

Zoom Videos Exposed: When ‘Secure’ Isn’t Secure Enough

The Washington Post recently reported more than 15,000 of Zoom’s customers’ recorded video calls could be found on open cloud storage spaces, YouTube, and Vimeo. While Zoom does offer private cloud hosting and password-protected sharing features to paid subscribers, administrator controls over cloud recordings are limited, which introduces enough room for user error to create a sizable security risk when it comes to sensitive meeting recording assets.

Here are 3 ways your Zoom videos could end up exposed online:

When recordings are set to expire or an account is approaching its allotted cloud storage capacity, individual users may download and then share their meeting recordings through other, less secure, means.
If individual users don’t enable the right settings to secure their Zoom cloud recordings, they open the door to potential unauthorized views, downloads, and shares that you may never know about.
Anyone who downloads a Zoom cloud recording to their local drive can then share it however they please, with whomever they please.

Zoom is a great tool for holding and recording meetings. But most organizations need additional support for managing and sharing on-demand video recordings.

A More Productive Solution For Sharing Zoom Recordings Securely

Panopto’s video management system is like a private internal YouTube for your business, but better. And when integrated with Zoom, you have a complete, secure, and scalable solution for video collaboration and productivity.

With Panopto, every Zoom recording can be uploaded automatically to your organization’s secure video library where you get powerful administrator controls that enable you to do the following:

Manage user permissions and sharing restrictions for meeting recordings across teams and the entire organization
Set your own content retention policies and availability windows for meeting recordings
Know exactly who has watched what with detailed video analytics down to the user level
Auto-share meeting recordings with meeting participants immediately following the meeting without any action from employees or the meeting host

Here’s what else your organization can do when you integrate Panopto with Zoom:

Secure and Scale Video Hosting with Unlimited, Long-Term Cloud Storage

Moreover, with Panopto there are no limits on how long your videos will be stored or how many videos you can upload to your library. Whether you’re recording just a few select meetings or every single one, Panopto gives you space for them all, without adding costs. And all your Zoom recordings that are uploaded to Panopto are set to private by default, so you don’t have to worry about sensitive information getting out.

Edit, Transcribe, and Search Zoom Recordings

Panopto includes an online video editor so you can cut out off-topic sections in the middle, trim dead time from the ends, and even splice together multiple Zoom meeting recordings.

Panopto also automatically transcribes every word spoken aloud and indexes every word shown on-screen in the Zoom meetings uploaded to your library with our AI-powered video search engine called Smart Search. That means that you and your colleagues can find any Zoom recording you have access to in your organization’s entire library and jump to the exact moment where a specific topic is discussed — without having to hunt and peck through the full video.

Your teams can also search for and share your Zoom recordings securely with each other easily through Slack using Panopto’s new Slack App.

Collaborate Inside Zoom Meeting Recordings

Panopto captures every detail from the original meeting in full HD and offers a unique multi-stream viewing experience that shows more than just picture-in-picture. Viewers can see the speaker view next to the presenter’s screen share, as well as the gallery view and chat messages from the meeting, which means that they can see the meeting exactly as it happened even if they couldn’t be there. Panopto’s interactive video player also enables teams to collaborate inside the video player through time-stamped comments and discussions, so no one has to create a new document or send another email.

Watch a meeting captured and shared with Panopto’s Zoom integration below. Click here to watch in full-screen.

Zoom Without Limits!

With unlimited, centralized storage and permissioning managed at scale, Zoom recordings can be shared securely through Panopto with just a few clicks (or none at all) and watched from anywhere on any device — without downloading anything.

Ultimately, Panopto helps your organization get more value from both your live meetings and the recordings that document them by making it easier for employees to access and utilize the information stored inside Zoom recordings as needed.

Want to learn more about how Panopto and Zoom work together to make recording and sharing meetings more efficient and your teams more productive?