What does the Waiting Room feature in Zoom Rooms do?

The Waiting Room feature allows the host to control when a participant joins the meeting. As the meeting host, you can admit attendees one by one, or hold all attendees in the Waiting Room and admit them all at once. You can send all participants to the Waiting Room when joining your meeting, or you can allow participants from your Zoom account and participants with specified domains to bypass the Waiting Room. As the host, you can also choose to automatically move participants to the Waiting Room while a meeting is in progress if you lose connection from the meeting.

When participants join a meeting, place them in a waiting room and require the host to admit them individually. Enabling the waiting room automatically disables the setting for allowing participants to join before host.

This can be good for a number of situations ie. if you are introducing someone new to a team, if you are strategizing with someone on your team before a big call, if you are conducting individual internal interviews, if you don't want interruptions from someone who is late you can admit them after the end of your sentence, or if simply don't want the meeting to start without you.

Some of the other settings are you can move everyone to a waiting room if you drop off the call unexpectedly. This would be good if you are in the middle of a big presentation and the call drops or if you are a teacher with a full class. Then you won't have people talking while you are gone and you can pick back up right where you left off.