Zoom Updates & Changes

May 4, 2020 in Collegewide, Working Remotely

Zoom is updating yet again to improve the security of the platform. Changes to the way encryption is implemented will require version 5.0 or later of the desktop client. Zoom meetings will continue to be backward compatible to earlier versions of the Zoom desktop client until May 31st. After this date, you MUST be using a 5.X version of the Zoom desktop client.

Engineering IT is working to keep your Zoom desktop client up-to-date on your UF computers. In some cases UF computers that have been taken home may not be reachable by our endpoint management platform. As a result, please verify that you are using the latest version of the Zoom desktop client.

Since we cannot install updates on your personal computers please make sure to check your client version often and update as needed.

Additionally, UF will also be changing some default settings to improve security. As of now the only default setting scheduled to be changed is to require passwords for each new meeting created. This will go into effect on Tuesday, May 5th.

UFIT is monitoring changes to the Zoom desktop client and its settings. Other changes to improve UF’s security when using Zoom are being evaluated. If any are warranted they will be announced on the UFIT news channel at https://news.it.ufl.edu/.

Finally, UFIT is making one other change that may be of limited impact to the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. The Zoom UFL-PHI site account will be consolidating into the main UFL site on Tuesday, May 5, 2020 at 6pm. In order to resolve the numerous issues and challenges presented by the use of a separate Zoom site account, all Zoom UFLPHI users are being migrated to the UFL master account. Other items to know about this change:

  • On May 5th at 6PM all user accounts in the UFLPHI Zoom site are being automatically moved to a dedicated ‘UF PHI’ group inside the main UFL account
  • All scheduled meetings, webinars and their links will continue to work as normal
  • There is no impact or action required by users, except that users that are accustomed to entering ‘UFLPHI’ as the SSO domain need only enter ‘UFL’
  • The UFL sign-in option, https://uflphi.zoom.us will be deprecated.
  • The ‘UF PHI’ group provides the same level of protection as the UFLPHI site account (Note: while cloud recording has been temporarily enabled for UFLPHI, at no point should sessions containing PHI be recorded on the cloud)
  • Zoom Rooms need to be manually migrated from UFLPHI. IT contacts have been involved in this transition.

Some key benefits of this consolidation are the elimination of cumbersome user-account migrations, the ability to co-host and delegate meetings across the entire UF population, and a single Canvas integration to afford cross-disciplinary faculty access to all courses. After this change a new ufl.zoom.us landing page will be put in place that eliminates the UFL PHI site login.

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