Zoom has unveiled a series of updates for its video conferencing and collaboration platforms, one of which may prove unpopular with the scatterbrains of this world.

Courtesy of integrations with Google and Outlook calendars, Zoom will soon begin to display a list of meeting invitees that have yet to join the call.

"Their invite response (accepted, declined, maybe) is listed with their name and the host can easily invite them to the meeting from the participants panel," the company explained.

Although useful in a number of contexts (such as taking the register for a virtual class, for example), gone will be the days of slinking into a team meeting a few minutes late, with the host none the wiser.

Strangely, the feature will only be available to free users during an initial beta test, before rolling out to all customers at a later date.

Zoom update

In addition to the attendee status feature, Zoom is also making a few less contentious upgrades, in a bid to "optimize your personal experience throughout the meeting lifecycle - before, during and after the meeting."

For instance, the company is making it easier to see which security features are active for any given meeting, simply by clicking on the shield icon in the top-left corner of the meeting screen. To preserve bandwidth for shared content, users will also be able to disable all incoming video feeds, without cutting them off for everyone else.

In Zoom Chat, the company's messaging platform, users will be able to make use of rich text formatting options, such as bold, italic, font size, indenting and more. And users can also now quote original messages in their responses, minimizing opportunity for confusion in high-traffic channels.

Finally, Zoom is making a few changes to its conference room offering. Zoom Rooms users will soon be able to make use of a number of features previously reserved for the standard video conferencing service, such as breakout rooms and focus mode, as well as benefiting from support for a wider range of hardware.

The new features will roll out in the coming weeks.