Teams Q&A is now Generally Available

Today, at Microsoft Inspire we announced that Q&A is now available in Microsoft Teams meetings and webinars. Previously, Q&A was available as an app but now the Q&A functionality is built directly into Teams for a simple way to track and organize questions as they are submitted during meetings and webinars. 

Simplify audience participation

Q&A helps both organizers and attendees see a moderated list of questions and answers during a meeting or webinar. Powered by the functionality that you are familiar with, like reactions and replies, meeting organizers can manage questions and answers as they come in and choose which questions to publish or dismiss. This helps reduce question overload and redundancy and enables organizers to emphasize best answers. It also allows organizers to pin conversations, moderate questions, and dismiss or remove questions that are off topic or have already been addressed.

How to add Q&A to your meetings and webinars

Enable Q&A through Meeting Options to enable structured conversations where attendees ask questions, moderators review, and speakers answer those questions. You can add Q&A before or during a meeting or webinar. Learn more about these settings here.

Please note: The existing Q&A app in the Teams App Store will be removed in August 2022. Going forward, Meeting Organizers and Co-Organizers must use Meeting Options to enable Q&A in their meetings. If there are existing meetings where Q&A was added from the Teams App Store, please remove the Q&A app and switch to using Q&A enabled through Meeting Options or you may see two versions of Q&A in your meeting or webinar. The duplicate version will show the organizer instructions on how to remove the previous app.

There is no data lost when switching Q&A from the Teams App Store to enabling via Meeting Options. All questions, conversations, comments, etc. will continue to be available in the Q&A experience enabled via Meeting Options. 

Using Q&A during your Meeting

Prior to the meeting you can inform speakers and attendees how they can submit questions.  Meeting organizers can pin important messages in the Q&A feed. Pin the agenda, expectations, or information to the top of the Q&A feed to remind people of the guidelines for Q&A during the call. You can also do this at the start of the meeting.

Encourage people how to submit questions

Feel free to use the image below or make your own to remind attendees at the beginning of the meetings.

Reduce duplication by deleting messages

Organizers can delete any question or reply from the feed to keep the conversation on track. Additionally, when you are done with a question or discussion you can close it out and stop attendees from replying.

Post anonymously

Attendees can choose to post questions anonymously when this setting is enabled by a moderator. The posted question is not associated with the attendee. Replies and reactions are not posted anonymously. Moderators can turn off anonymous posting at any time. Questions that were previously anonymous will continue to show up as anonymous.

Answer questions as they come in!

You can answer live or reply directly. To help keep track of the questions coming in, filter by All Questions, Answered Questions and Unanswered Questions.

Manage Question Moderation

Meeting organizers and co-organizers can moderate and manage what attendees see in the Q&A feed. It’s good practice to let attendees know that questions and discussions will be reviewed, and everything may not be published live. Turn on moderation to review questions and discussions from attendees before they are published for attendees to see. Moderation cannot be turned off in a meeting once it has been turned on. 

When moderation is turned on, all new questions and discussions posted by attendees are placed in the In review queue. Organizers and Co-organizers can choose to Publish or Dismiss questions and discussions.

When a question is published, everyone can see it, react, or respond. When a question is dismissed, it’s moved to the dismissed queue and not visible to attendees. Dismissed questions can be put back into the In review queue and published if necessary.

What's next?

• Use Q&A before and after the meeting: Get attendees to engage by asking questions before the meeting starts and continue the conversation long after the meeting is over through the Teams calendar page.

• Use Q&A on Web: Attend a meeting in Teams via a browser and use Q&A.

• Insights: Understand attendee engagement through rich analytics.

• Enhanced moderator experiences: Spotlight a question, mark it live, enable rich media, and more.

Try it today. Learn more about using Q&A in Meetings here.  Technical guidance for managing your tenant can be found in this support document. After you’ve tried out Q&A in your meetings and webinars, please share your feedback! https://aka.ms/QnASurvey