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Online Meetings

Online Meetings is where you set up the Zoom sessions for your group, keep the list of people who attend, and get the link everyone joins with. This guide walks through every part of it, one task at a time.

In this guide

Signing in
Finding your way around
Adding people to your address book
Putting people into groups
Scheduling a meeting
Scheduling a repeating meeting
Changing a meeting
Cancelling a meeting
On the day: starting your meeting
Starting a meeting right now
Signing out

1. Signing in

Do this once each time you open the site.

Open the Online Meetings web address in your browser. You will see a picture of people reading the Bible, the CBS logo and EXPLORE THE BIBLE TOGETHER.
Click SIGN IN. The page hands you over to the Community Bible Study sign-in service.
If you are already signed in to your CBS account on that computer, you will be brought straight back — there is nothing to type. If you are not, sign in with your usual CBS email and password when asked.
You will land on the Dashboard, with your name shown in the top right corner.

Good to know. You never type a password into Online Meetings itself. Everything goes through the same CBS sign-in you use elsewhere. If you open the site in a second browser tab, click SIGN IN again — it only takes the one click.

2. Finding your way around

There are three places, listed down the left side of every page:

Dashboard — your home page. A calendar on the left, and your list of Upcoming Meetings on the right.
Address Book — the people you invite, and the groups you sort them into.
My Meetings — everything you have scheduled, with full details for each one.

The button with three lines at the very top left hides and shows that menu, which gives you a little more room on a small screen.

Reading the Upcoming Meetings list

Each meeting in the list shows its name, its date and time, and its description. A blue Recurring tag means it is one date from a repeating series. On the right of each one is Edit Meeting. If you have more than five meetings coming up, use the small arrows at the bottom of the list to page through them.

3. Adding people to your address book

Worth doing once for everyone in your group or people you will meet with frequently — then you can invite them with a click instead of typing addresses every time.

Click Address Book in the left menu, then make sure you are on the CONTACTS tab.
Click Create Contact. A short form opens on the right.
Fill in the three boxes: First Name, Last Name, and Email — the address their invitation should go to. The email is required.
Click Create. They appear in the list on the left straight away.

Finding someone

Type any part of a name or an email address into the Search box and the list narrows as you type. The Sort by dropdown next to it re-orders the list four ways: A–Z or Z–A, by first name or by last name.

Changing someone’s details

Click their name in the list. Their details appear on the right.
Click the pencil icon in the top right of that panel.
Edit whatever needs changing, then click Save. Cancel backs out without saving.

Good to know. If you change someone’s email address, the app tells you it will also update that address on every meeting they are already invited to. That is usually exactly what you want — one change and they are right everywhere.

Removing someone

Click their name in the list.
Click the red bin icon at the top right.
Read the message, then click DELETE CONTACT to confirm, or CANCEL to keep them.

Careful. Deleting a contact cannot be undone. If you only want to leave them out of one meeting, edit that meeting instead — see Changing a meeting.

4. Putting people into groups

A group is a saved list of contacts — your whole group, a team, or other category. Invite the group and everyone in it is invited at once.

Go to Address Book and click the GROUPS tab.
Click Create Group.
Give the group a Name — this is the only part you must fill in. A short Description is optional but helps other leaders know what it is for.
Click Add Contact. A box opens listing everyone in your address book.
Tick the people you want. There is a search box at the top, and a Select All tick box if you want everybody.
Click Add. The people you chose appear as small circles under Contacts.
Click Create. Your group is saved.

Changing who is in a group

Click the group’s name, then the pencil icon.
To take someone out, click the small red × on their circle.
To add someone, click Add Contact and tick them. Anyone already in the group will not be listed again.
Click Save.

You can also rename the group or rewrite its description in the same place. To remove a whole group, click the red bin icon and confirm — the people in it stay in your address book.

5. Scheduling a meeting

For a one-off session. Setting up a weekly class? Skip to Scheduling a repeating meeting.

Scheduling takes three short steps, shown as tabs across the top of the box: Meeting Details, Add Participants, then Review & Confirm.

From the Dashboard, click Create A New Meeting. (You can also go to My Meetings and click Create Meeting — it is the same form.)
Fill in the details:
- Meeting Title — what your class will see. Required.
- Meeting Description — a line or two about the session, such as the passage you are covering.
- Start Date — type the date, or click the small calendar icon and pick it.
- Start Time — type it, or click the clock icon and set the hour, minutes and AM/PM, then OK.
- End Time — when you expect to finish. It must be later than the start time.
Click Next to move to Add Participants. There are three ways to invite people, and you can mix them:
- Contacts — tick anyone from your address book.
- Add Email — type one address and click Add Email, for a guest who is not a saved contact.
- Groups — tick a whole group. Click Click here to view the group members first if you want to check who is in it.
Everyone you pick appears as a small tag above the tabs. To drop someone, click the × on their tag.
Click Review. Check the summary — title, date, time and the number of people invited.
Click Create Meeting. Your meeting appears in My Meetings and on your Dashboard.

Good to know. Use BACK at any point to return to an earlier step — nothing you have typed is lost. When you invite a group, the meeting lists its members individually afterwards, so you can see exactly who was included.

6. Scheduling a repeating meeting

For a class that meets on the same day every week, or any other regular pattern.

Go to My Meetings and click the RECURRING MEETINGS tab, then Create Recurring Meeting.
Fill in the title, description, date and times exactly as you would for a single meeting.
Tick the Recurring Meeting box. A Recurrence Details section appears underneath.
Set the pattern: an End Date for the last date the series should run to, and a Frequency Type — Daily, Weekly, Bi-Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly.
Read the sentence underneath — it describes your schedule in plain English, for example “Meeting occurs every week on Tuesday from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM.” Adjust the boxes until that sentence says what you mean.
Click Next, add your participants, click Review, then Create Meeting.
Open the series from the RECURRING MEETINGS tab and check the list of dates under Meeting Occurrences before you tell your class. Click any date to see who is invited to it.

The Recurring Meetings tab shows each series with how many meetings it contains and how often it repeats. The individual dates also appear in the SINGULAR MEETINGS list, each marked with a blue Recurring tag.

7. Changing a meeting

Something moved, or you need to invite one more person.

A one-off meeting

Go to My Meetings, SINGULAR MEETINGS, and click the meeting. (Edit Meeting on the Dashboard gets you to the same place.)
Click the pencil icon at the top right of the details panel.
Make your changes, clicking Next and Review to step through, then Update Meeting to save.

Good to know. If you move the start time, the end time shifts with it automatically so the meeting keeps the same length. Change the end time afterwards if you want it to run longer or shorter.

One date in a repeating series

Say your class meets weekly but one week you start half an hour late.

Go to SINGULAR MEETINGS and click that specific date.
Click the pencil icon. The box reminds you that you are editing only this one date and that the rest of the series will not change.
Make the change and save. That date is then marked with an orange Edited tag so you can see at a glance that it differs from the others.

The whole series

Go to the RECURRING MEETINGS tab and click the series name.
Click the pencil icon. A warning tells you the change will apply to every meeting in the series.
Make the change and save. Every date in the series updates together.

8. Cancelling a meeting

Deleting is permanent, so it is worth knowing which of the two you are doing.

One date only

Go to SINGULAR MEETINGS and click that date.
Click the red bin icon, then confirm with DELETE MEETING.

If that date belonged to a repeating series, only that one meeting goes. The rest of the series carries on, and its meeting count drops by one.

A whole series

Go to the RECURRING MEETINGS tab and click the series.
Click the red bin icon. The message names the series and tells you how many meetings will be removed.
Click DELETE SERIES to confirm.

Careful. Neither of these can be undone, and there is no wastebasket to fish a meeting back out of. Take a moment over the confirmation message — it always names exactly what is about to go.

9. On the day: starting your meeting

Open the meeting from My Meetings and look at the Meeting Links section. Until shortly before the start time it reads “The meeting link will be generated 30 minutes before the meeting starts.” Thirty minutes beforehand, two links appear in its place:

Host Link — yours. This is the one that opens the meeting and makes you the host.
Participant Link — everyone else’s. There is a copy button beside it so you can paste it into an email or message.

Click your Host Link. A Zoom page opens in a new tab.
Choose Join from Zoom Workplace app if Zoom is installed on your computer, or Join from browser if it is not. Your browser may ask permission to open Zoom — say yes.
Zoom opens and your class can join.

Careful. Send your class the Participant Link, never the Host Link. The host link carries your host permissions with it — anyone who has it can take control of the meeting.

10. Starting a meeting right now

For an unplanned conversation — a prayer call, or a quick catch-up with your core team.

On the Dashboard, click Start Meeting Now, the green button at the top of Upcoming Meetings.
Add anyone you would like invited, using the Contacts, Groups or Manual Email tabs. You can also skip this entirely and simply share the link yourself.
Click Start Meeting Now. A confirmation appears with Meeting Started! and your two links.
Copy the Participant Link now, using the copy button beside it, and paste it wherever you are inviting people from — a text, an email, a group chat.
Click Click HERE to start your meeting to open Zoom, then choose the app or the browser as before.
When you are finished with the confirmation box, click Close.

Careful. Copy the participant link before you close that window. It is the quickest way to get people into a meeting you have started on the spur of the moment, and you will want it to hand.

11. Signing out

Click the small icon to the right of your name, in the top right corner. You will be signed out and taken to a confirmation page.

Careful. On a shared or public computer, close the whole browser afterwards as well. Signing out of Online Meetings does not sign you out of your CBS account on that machine.

Still stuck?

If something is not behaving the way this guide describes, the first thing worth trying is refreshing the page — Online Meetings does a lot of its work behind the scenes and an occasional refresh sets it right.

If that does not help, send a request through Answers with the name of the meeting and what you were trying to do, and someone will pick it up.