During the draw process, Tabtastic can generate Zoom allocations for each of your buildings, if this has been enabled in the Allocation tab of the Tournament Manager. This page covers how to use these allocations, rather than the draw process itself. For details on the draw, read Draw Release. To use Zoom allocations, you will need to set up at least one building, see Buildings for instructions.
Zoom Allocations require you to have enabled both the “Breakout room” and “Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling” options in your Zoom account settings before the meeting has been started.
Consider setting the meeting to “Require authentication to join” to avoid people joining without signing into their Zoom accounts. However be aware this can cause problems for Chromebook users.
This is the standard method of generating allocations for your Zoom meetings. It involves meeting hosts manually scheduling the meetings for each round, uploading a CSV file to the “Breakout Room pre-assign” option and using the /meeting command to set the meeting link.
Once you reach the Setup Meetings prompt in the draw process, Tabtastic will send you a CSV file for each of your configured Buildings. This CSV file is designed for Zoom, and allows you to pre-assign breakout rooms. Download the CSV files, then go to the Zoom website (zoom.us/meeting), schedule the meeting for the round, then scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Breakout Room pre-assign”. Then pick “Import from CSV” and upload the CSV file Tabtastic generated. Once uploaded, save the meeting and the allocation will be stored.
Now that the allocations have been uploaded to Zoom, you need to copy the link to your Zoom meeting and use the /meeting <building> <link> command to set the link for the meeting (e.g. /meeting Doghouse https://zoom.us/j/...). If you make a mistake, you can change the meeting link by just sending the command again. Once the links have been set for all meetings, you can click the tick react on the original draw message, and Tabtastic will notify all participants of the draw using the links you have set.
This is a new experimental method of generating allocations for your Zoom meetings. It involves linking a Zoom account to each of your buildings before the tournament starts, allowing Tabtastic to automatically schedule the Zoom meetings for each round and prepare the breakout rooms. With this method, all that meeting hosts are required to do is to join the meeting and open the breakout rooms.
If you want to change the associated Zoom account at any time, just repeat step 4.
Once you have connected your building to your Zoom account, when using the /draw command, a meeting for the targeted round will automatically be scheduled on your Zoom account, with automatically generated breakout rooms for the participants in that building. The join link for the scheduled meeting will also be automatically set as the link for that building, and will be sent to participants with the draw.
You will still be prompted to check that everything is ready before the link will be sent to participants, however the breakout room CSV files will not be sent and Tabtastic will not ask you to provide a meeting URL.
If you have other buildings which are not using the Zoom integration, they will still be handled manually as before, but the Zoom integrated buildings will not show up during the meeting preparation stage.
To unlink a Zoom account from a building, you can either:
Regardless of which method you use, make sure to save your tournament afterwards.
You can also remove the Tabtastic integration from the Zoom marketplace, however this will leave your building in an unconfigured state, and you will still need to delete it or reconfigure it to draw a round.
It should be very easy to see if the Tabtastic Zoom integration is working, when Tabtastic asks you to make sure you are ready for the draw, the Zoom meeting will have been scheduled, so you can check your Meetings page and see if it is present.
In case there is an error scheduling your meeting, Tabtastic will inform you that it was unable to schedule your meeting. In this case, try re-authorising the building by clicking on the “Authorise” button in the “Allocation” tab of the Tournament Manager, or try deleting and re-creating the building.
If breakout rooms are not automatically being generated, make sure you have enabled both “Breakout rooms” and “Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling” in your Zoom account settings.
We also recommend enabling “Allow participants to choose room” so that participants can swap between rooms if needed, which can be especially beneficial if you need to send swing speakers to a room last minute or if you need to swap judges from one room to another.