Configuring a ZOOM External Link with Meeting URL

Post by **Pauven** » Tue Apr 14, 2020 9:49 am

With the rise of social distancing also comes a further rise in social media, causing the popularity of video conferencing apps like Zoom to skyrocket. To be honest, I didn't even know Zoom existed until a few weeks ago, when my girlfriend started attending her Saturday morning workout classes via Zoom. It was immediately obvious to us that running Zoom on the living room's HTPC would allow her plenty of space to exercise while watching the video on the big screen.

A result of this is that I've added Zoom as a preconfigured External Link for CMC v3.3, out soon. But this will simply launch Zoom to the default view, and you may want to have it directly open a meeting instead, especially if you have a recurrent meeting for which the # and password never changes.

So here's a quick tutorial on configuring a custom External Link to launch a static meeting.

As a reminder, only External Links 8, 9, 10 and 11 can be customized, so you will need to use one of those links to complete this setup. I'll use Link 8 in my examples here.

Go to Settings > External Links

Select the External Link you want to configure, "Link 8", and set it to "Custom App"

Assign the Exe for that Link, "L-8 Exe" for Link 8, browse to the Zoom.exe: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Zoom\bin\Zoom.exe
TIP: you can alternatively paste this value into the File name box and click Open: %appdata%\Zoom\bin\Zoom.exe

For the Icon, "L-8 Icon", select LinkIcon_Zoom.png (available in CMC v3.3) or whatever you want if you're running an older version.

Finally you want to set the Exe Parameters to launch the specific meeting, "L-8 Exe Params". You'll want to use this format for the value:
--url=<meeting url goes here>

For that last step, you will want to use the full URL that was provided by the meeting host. For example:

Code: Select all

--url=https://us04web.zoom.us/k/837649838?pwd=TkdSm459KdwO3k0GSj38sk

Note that is a fake meeting invite above, it's just an example of what a value should look like. The important part is that the URL includes both the meeting ID # and the password (the pwd= value). Now when you launch the Zoom External Link you have configured, it will open directly to that meeting, and you won't have to type in a # or password. And if you have multiple Zoom meetings you want to configure, CMC has up to 4 custom links that you can use.