Engage Your Audience with Forms Polls in Microsoft Teams Meetings

Ability to add and create Teams apps for Microsoft Teams meetings were just announced generally available. It means that you can add or create apps for your meetings to help meeting planning before the meeting, engage and participate during the meeting and wrap-up after the meeting. There are now nearly 20 apps, which support meetings available and one them is Microsoft Forms. In this blog post I’ll go through how you can engage your attendees with Forms polls.

Prepare the meeting

You can add polls already when preparing the meeting. Adding a Forms app is simple, open a meeting from Teams calendar and click + sign to add a tab.

On top of the apps list you will see apps, which are optimized to be used in meetings. Pick Forms, select Add from next info screen and Save on the next one. Now you can start creating new polls for your meeting on the tab. You can also create polls on the fly during meeting using the tab or using new meeting side panel.

For a single poll you can add a question and up to six options, select is it single or multiple answer, choose to share results automatically and keeping answers anonymous. When you click save, your poll will appear on the Polls tab.

Using polls in meeting

Polls can be launched from Polls tab or using new meeting extensibility side panel.

When poll is launched, attendees with new meeting experience enabled can answer to a poll inside of meeting canvas. When poll is launched, you cannot edit it anymore.

Polls are also sent as cards to meeting chat, so people who join in from mobile or with browser are able to answer and see results.

After poll is closed you can export results, which downloads an Excel file. Report contains timestamps, email, user’s name and answer(s). Email and name are not included in anonymous polls. Poll can be then removed or reopened, if you need to for example use it for recurring voting.

Things to notice

Role of the meeting organizer is really important. Meeting organizers and presenters can create, manage and launch all polls created and add new ones. Organizer can control presenters during the meeting or set presenters beforehand using meeting options.

External users can manage polls, if user is on presenter role after Polls app is added to meeting. So, set presenter roles according before the meeting.

Plan your polls for clear and easy answers for attendees. Decide can you collect user info with answers and are you going to share result to users during the poll. Notice that if your select for not sharing results, you cannot share poll results at all to attendees. If you want to share results, you can paste them in to your presentation, share a screen capture of the results or just go though the results by talking.

On recurring meetings you need to add polls to every occurrence separately.

Meeting extensions are not available currently on channel meetings.

Afterword

Forms polls are really good and waited improvement. Now attendees can really focus on the meeting and you as a organizer or presenter can engage the audience easily.