MS Polls question

Question

I am hosting a webinar soon and plan to use the Polls feature. I have already installed the app for the webinar event. My question is this - when I run a test webinar, I found that participants have access to the Polls tab and are able to create polls and push them to the rest of the participants. Can I disable this feature and still use the Polls myself as the webinar organizer..or should we be using Forms links instead of Polls to avoid this issue?

Answer 1

Hi @Marius Trif,

According to your concern, I have created a webinar to reproduce your situation in my testing environment, and the result turns out that there is no configuration for Polls to be available only for organizers. This is what I have achieved:

• When Polls is added to a Teams meeting, all of attendees, organizers and presenters have permission to create and launch their polls in the meeting chats.
• When I try to disable Polls and set the availability to only specific users (who are organizer and co-organizers) in Teams Admin Center, the specific users can create and share polls in meeting chats. However, since the attendees are disabled from using Polls, they also cannot submit their responses through Polls.
• In short, disable/enable Polls for attendees also disable/enable both their abilities to create and submit. Currently there is no option to separately configure these settings.

I'm really sorry that you're going through this and it's clear that this hasn't been the smoothest experience. I have shared your feedback internally and I also strongly recommend submitting in-app feedback or go to Microsoft 365 Feedback Hub > send feedback. This is the most effective way to ensure your voice reaches the product team and can be considered for future improvements.    

Once you've submitted your feedback, feel free to share the link here in the comments. I’ll be happy to upvote it to help bring more visibility.  

For now, I highly recommend upvoting this post as well. That way, other users who encounter the same question will see the clarification, and more of them may report similar problem, helping to bring attention to the request. The more reports the team receives, especially from business users, the faster issues like this can be prioritized and resolved as soon as possible. 

I know this is not the experience you expected, and I want to thank you for your patience while the team works on improvements.  

Thank you for your understanding and corporation. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with. 

Looking forward to your response.

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Answer 2

Polls in Teams meetings/webinars are controlled by meeting roles, not by a separate Polls-specific permission. Only organizers and presenters are intended to manage polls; attendees can respond but should not be able to create or launch polls.

To keep using Polls while preventing participants from creating or pushing polls, ensure that external participants join as attendees, not presenters. In the meeting options for the webinar, set who can present (for example, “Only me”). That way, only organizer/presenters see the Polls authoring experience; attendees only see and answer polls when launched.

Using Forms links is not required to avoid this issue; correct role configuration in the Teams meeting/webinar is the supported way to restrict who can create and launch polls while still using the Polls app.

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References:

• Get help with the Polls app for Microsoft Teams
• Poll attendees during a Teams meeting