BlueJeans Best Practices for Keeping Your Meetings Private

With video conferencing utilization skyrocketing across the globe, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that bad actors are trying to take advantage and disrupt unprotected and unsecured meetings. We wanted to provide a quick overview to remind BlueJeans users how best to protect their meetings and retain their privacy.

While you may be interested in recruiting as many attendees to your meeting as possible, exposing your Meeting ID on social media or other public forums can lead to the wrong kinds of attendees joining your session. If you are interested in hosting an “all-welcome” type of meeting, then beware of the risks associated with potentially malicious individuals attending who may try and share unsavory content. That said, if you are open to this type of meeting, we at least recommend using a One-Time Meeting ID, to ensure that you will not be exposing your Personal Meeting ID to the public, which could expose your other meetings to more unwanted guests. You can find this setting in your preferred calendar/scheduling tool when you are setting up the invitation.

BlueJeans offers users two types of passcodes: 1) Moderator Passcodes & 2) Participant Passcodes. Meeting hosts should use both passcodes to ensure they effectively control the meeting. Moderator Passcodes require that the meeting host or a designated delegate enter a specific code to start the meeting. This prohibits risky behavior happening before the official meeting host is there to police the meeting. Participant Passcodes add an additional layer of security to ensure that only attendees with the correct code can join the meeting. Additionally, BlueJeans offers advanced fraud detection to detect and report on repeated login failures and meeting join failures. This approach will block brute force scans looking for meeting IDs over a set period of time and protect meetings from being entered by malicious actors.

Meeting hosts have the ability to track who joins meetings in a variety of different ways. First, they can select an audible alert that announces when an attendee joins and there is also the capability to enable entry and exit banners that present the name of the joining attendee at the top of the screen. Additionally, the meeting host can use the meeting roster to double check who is in the video conference. If there are names that you do not recognize on the list, you can either ask who they are audibly or over chat to confirm their identity.

Meeting hosts have a variety of powerful controls at their disposal in case they are dealing with unwanted meeting participants. First, and maybe most necessary, is the ability to expel or drop a participant. This feature automatically removes that meeting participant and bans them from rejoining the meeting. Next, meeting hosts have the ability to lock a meeting once all of the required individuals are present. This feature is critical when meeting attendees will be reviewing sensitive information and don’t want any other individuals to join the meeting. If a meeting host is accidently using their Personal Meeting ID, you could have one meeting run over and accidently reveal private information to coworkers just because they were on time for the next meeting, something most meeting hosts would surely like to avoid. Finally, hosts have the ability to control participant audio and video with mute all and participant-specific controls. These features are useful when trying to keep the group focused and avoid unnecessary disruptions.

When meeting hosts are conducting large meetings with more than 25 people, it might be useful to delegate responsibilities to another individual who can access all of the meeting controls through the live control dashboard in Command Center. This will free up the meeting host to run the meeting and the delegate can ensure that the meeting remains secure and protected.

Enjoy your Meetings!