Use of Zoom in parent-teacher meetings

Hi, my first attempt at creating a booking system to allow 300 parents to book 10 min slots with 16 teachers over a 2 day period. I used Zoom integration to send out links during the booking process in the confirmation emails.I thought I had it working until I was testing, I had one zoom call running with one “teacher” and one “parent”, then I tried starting a second zoom meeting with a different teacher / parent combination and it asked me to end the first meeting. It appears that I cant have all 16 teachers using one zoom account. That I could understand from zooms point of view, but if I am trying to have 16 meetings going on at one time, I could make each teacher use their own individual Zoom account, but how do I make the links that get sent from smoothbook have all the different zoom accounts as I can only see a way to add one zoom?

Hi @Jacqui_E,

Ok sorry you are actually the first person to do this. I assumed that Zoom would have a way of hosting multiple concurrent meetings but it looks like even on their paid plans you can host at most two at a time.

I can definitely see the use case for each resource in a Smoothbook account to be able to connect a separate Zoom account but - sorry - this is not currently on the development roadmap.

Unfortunately the only way I can see of doing this with Smoothbook is to accept the bookings and then the teachers invite the parents manually when the meeting is due to start. Speaking from my own experience this is pretty simple to do: the teacher’s will have the email addresses of the parents, they just need to invite them to the meeting through the Zoom app. You could put a message in the confirmation emails that this is what’s going to happen.

Hope that helps,

James

Thank you, once again, for your quick response. OK, I feel better now, knowing it wasn’t me :wink:

So, if I want to set up appointments for all the teachers, am I able to do it from 1 email address (I’d have to create a generic email) but the teachers would still need to see their appointments.

In my head I’m thinking, I’d send the link out, the parent chooses their slot and it would come back to me and the resource which is already a generic email. Well at the moment we have Year1@ that is shared with two year1 teachers, so on. Would this work?

I have created the Teachers as resources but not made them users. The head would like for me to deal with as much as possible. I still think it’s going to be down to the teachers to send out their own links, but I don’t think it’s going to be Zoom, we may use Google meet. I think we use your system for setting up appointments only but reply with our own google links is that possible.

Thanks so much,
Jacqui :slight_smile:

You can do it this way no problem but keep in mind that everyone will have access to the owner account and so can update settings, delete the entire account, etc. If it were me I’d have one owner account and one ‘agent’ account with a different email and password then give out the agent account email address. This account will have access to all the bookings, etc. but is unable to change the core settings of the system.

Yes that should work!

I think this is going to be the best solution for you: use Smoothbook for the booking but manage the video conferencing separately.

Hope that helps!