Manage Q&A in Teams meetings and events

APPLIES TO: Meetings Webinars Town halls

Q&A allows presenters, organizers, and co-organizers to take questions from attendees and answer them in real time. This feature is best suited for large, structured meetings and events– like town halls, webinars, all hands, and trainings. Town hall and webinar organizers and co-organizers can export the event's questions and answers to a CSV file.

Your organization might have requirements to limit which organizers can use Q&A. As an admin, you can control whether an organizer can enable Q&A in their meetings and events.

To learn more about Q&A for your users, see Q&A in Microsoft Teams meetings.

Prerequisites

• Verify that access to Viva Engage’s IPs and URLs isn't blocked.
  • If you have a GCC tenant, verify that your firewall isn't blocking access to GCC services hosted from https://web.gov.yammer.com and https://*.rt.gov.yammer.com.
• To allow users in your organization to add Q&A to Teams meetings and events, you must confirm that sign-ins for the Office 365 Viva Engage service are enabled in Microsoft Entra ID. Follow these steps to confirm that sign-ins are enabled:
  • Go to the Microsoft Entra admin center > Identity > Applications > Enterprise Applications > Viva Engage > Properties.
  • For the Enabled for users to sign-in? option, select Yes if necessary.

When you enable Q&A, organizers can turn on Q&A in their Meeting options when creating or updating meetings and events. Through Teams and Outlook meeting options, organizers can also remove Q&A from meetings where it was previously added to prevent attendees from using the feature.

Manage Q&A

Teams admin center

Follow these steps to control which organizers can use Q&A in their meetings and events:

1. Open the Teams admin center.
2. Expand Meetings from the navigation pane.
3. Under Meetings, select Meeting policies.
4. Either select an existing policy or create a new one.
5. Navigate to the Meeting Engagement section and toggle Q&A On or Off.
6. Select Save.
7. Assign the policy to specific Microsoft 365 groups, users, or subscriptions that you want to allow or prevent from setting up Q&A.

PowerShell

To manage whether organizers can use Q&A in their meetings and events, use the -QnAEngagementMode parameter within the PowerShell CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet.

To allow organizers with this policy to use Q&A in meetings and events they create, use the following script:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -QnAEngagementMode Enabled

To prevent organizers with this policy from using Q&A in meetings and events they create, use the following script:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -QnAEngagementMode Disabled

Available languages for Viva Engage vs Teams

Q&A defaults to the user’s language for Teams. When there’s a difference in the languages available for Teams versus Viva Engage, the following language defaults occur:

• Nearest Primary Language—Viva Engage defaults to the nearest primary language, if available. For example, Viva Engage doesn’t have a French Canadian (fr-CA) version, so it displays content in French (fr-FR) instead.
• Unsupported Language—If Viva engage doesn't support the language at all, Viva Engage defaults to US English (en-US).

eDiscovery

eDiscovery for Q&A works the same as eDiscovery for any other Viva Engage content.

• If you use Q&A in your tenant’s Teams application, this content is available in eDiscovery regardless of the configuration or existence of your Viva Engage network. To use eDiscovery for standard Viva Engage content, your Viva Engage network needs to be in Native Mode.
• All GCC tenants using Teams Q&A are automatically in native mode. No action is required to activate native mode for these tenants.
• When you perform eDiscovery, you can determine whether messages were generated in Viva Engage or through Q&A in Teams. In the File Metadata section, you can find that information in the Item Class field.
• If your organization uses the Q&A, powered by Viva Engage, the content Q&A generates is considered Viva Engage content and is discoverable. For more information about eDiscovery in Microsoft 365 apps, see eDiscovery solutions in Microsoft 365.
• If the meeting organizer enables anonymous posting, the questions attendees post are ingested into the organizer’s mailbox for eDiscovery.
• When external participants (users from an external organization using external access) from a different Microsoft 365 tenant, or guests join a Teams meeting that is hosted in your Microsoft 365 tenant, any questions they post into Q&A are ingested within your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Data Storage

Q&A messages created as part of the meeting are stored as Viva Engage messages. These messages are stored in Viva Engage and ingested for eDiscovery. Files are always stored in SharePoint, which handles all the data rest policies and locations.

The following guidance explains how messaging data is stored:

• Q&A content is searchable via eDiscovery at the user level.
• Teams Q&A data for GCC customers is stored in Microsoft's GCC data centers.
• Depending on your Viva Engage network location, if you don't have the Advanced Data Residency (ADR) add-on license, your message data is stored in North America or EU by default.
• If you have the ADR add-on license, or Go-Locals, your message content is stored in the same region as their Teams Go-Local content.
• Depending on your Viva Engage network location, message data, including message content is stored in North America or EU by default.
• For orgs without an existing Viva Engage network, the Q&A Viva Engage network is created in the United States Viva Engage region. Your org's messages for Q&A are always stored in the US, unless they have the ADR add-on license.
• Similar to OneNote tabs, removing the Q&A from a meeting doesn't delete the meeting data. Removing Q&A from the meeting only removes access to the data from the meeting. If your users add the Q&A tab back, they can see the meeting conversations again.

For details on the Advanced Data Residency (ADR) add-on license, see Advanced Data Residency in Microsoft 365.

Data subject requests and Q&A

When you complete a data subject request through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, it automatically removes users’ contact information from all their content in the Q&A.

For more information on data subject requests, see Azure Data Subject Requests for the GDPR and CCPA.

For more information about GDPR, see the GDPR section of the Microsoft Trust Center and the GDPR section of the Service Trust portal.

Data lifecycle for Q&A in Teams

The lifecycle of data generated by Q&A in Teams depends on your Viva Engage Data Retention settings in the Microsoft Purview portal. If you hard delete all users in the meeting who received a copy of the Q&A messages in their substrate shard via Microsoft Entra ID, Viva Engage deletes its copy of the Q&A content for that meeting within 30 days of user deletion.

Retention and deletion

Retention of content follows the retention policies set for Viva Engage – regardless of whether you have different policies set for Viva Engage and Teams.

Related topics

• Plan for meetings
• Plan for webinars
• Plan for town halls