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Do You Really Want Individual Users to Submit Feedback?
The Teams Feedback policy controls whether users can give Microsoft direct feedback and answer periodic surveys. The Give feedback option is available in the Help section of the Teams desktop, browser (Figure 1), and mobile clients. If allowed by policy, Microsoft posts surveys to ask users to rate their experience with Teams in the desktop and browser clients.
The feedback policy is one of the 40-odd policies used by Teams to manage different aspects of the application. No sign of the feedback policy appears in the set of policies managed through the Teams admin center. Instead, you must manage the policy using PowerShell, which might be the reason why its existence appears to be unknown to many tenant administrators.
Support Data
According to Microsoft’s documentation for feedback policies, they consider the information submitted when users give feedback as support data “under your Office 365 or Microsoft 365 agreement.” I assume this refers to the definition of diagnostic data shown in the Trust center (How Microsoft categorizes data for online services). I can’t find a definition for support data, but the summary for the page mentions support data, so that’s what we can go with.
Microsoft’s documentation for feedback policies says that the policy is a preview or early release feature. However, the policy has been around since late 2019 (see this discussion in the Microsoft Technical Community), so this is likely a false assertion. Or the feature is very delayed. According to the same documentation, feedback policies aren’t available in the GCC, GCC High or DoD clouds. And in Teams for Education, the options to submit feedback and suggest features are limited to teacher accounts.
Submitting Feedback
Submitting feedback is easy. Click the Give feedback option, enter the feedback in a pop-up screen (Figure 2), and send the data off to Microsoft.
Note the assertion on the screen that “Your IT admin will be able to collect this data.” It’s a curiously imprecise assertion. Does it mean that tenant administrators see the feedback submitted by users or just an audit event to say that a user submitted feedback? In any case, tenant administrators can find feedback submitted to Microsoft in the Product feedback section under Health in the Microsoft 365 admin center (Figure 3).
Feedback can be downloaded in a CSV file and analyzed to your heart’s content.
Blocking Feedback
Although admins can see where user feedback is posted, I still don’t like the idea of individual users submitting feedback to Microsoft. The view of an individual seldom reflects the priorities of the organization, and I think it is better for an organization to submit its feedback to Microsoft after gathering evidence, analyzing requirements, and understanding the impact of what changes in existing features or additional functionality they would like. I also think that it’s best to post suggestions for change in the Teams feedback portal. In fact, if you use the Suggest a feature option, that’s where the link takes you.
If you agree with my view, you’ll want to:
- Update the existing Global (default) policy to remove the options to give feedback and respond to surveys. Alternatively, Teams includes a feedback policy called Disabled for assignment to users whom you don’t want to submit feedback.
- Create a new feedback policy with the features disabled and assign it to the users who you do want to give feedback. Creating a new policy gives the tenant full control over its settings.
First, here’s how to check the available feedback policies by running Get-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy:
Get-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy | format-Table Identity, UserInitiatedMode, ReceiveSurveysMode Identity UserInitiatedMode ReceiveSurveysMode -------- ----------------- ------------------ Global Enabled EnabledUserOverride Tag:UserChoice Enabled EnabledUserOverride Tag:Enabled Enabled Enabled Tag:Disabled Disabled Disabled
- Enabled (can submit feedback) or Disabled (doesn’t see the Give feedback option in clients).
- ReceiveSurveysMode controls if Teams surveys the user. If Enabled, Teams can survey the user. If EnabledUserOverride, Teams can prompt the user to take a survey and the user can then opt out. Disabled means that Teams can’t survey the user.
To assign the Disabled feedback policy to users, run the Grant-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy cmdlet:
Grant-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy -Identity Jack.Smith@Office365itpros.com -PolicyName Disabled
Unfortunately, Teams bulk policy assignment does not support feedback policies. If you want to assign the Disabled feedback policy to a bunch of users, an easy approach is:
- Run the Get-CsOnlineUser cmdlet to extract the SMTP addresses for Teams users.
- Export the data to a CSV file.
- Edit the CSV file to remove the users whom you don’t want to block.
- Assign the Disabled feedback policy to the remaining users.
- Check that accounts have the correct feedback policy.
Here are the PowerShell commands:
# Extract Teams user data
[array]$Users =Get-CsOnlineUser | Select-Object UserPrincipalName
# Export data to CSV
$Users | Export-CSV -NoTypeInformation c:\temp\Users.csv
# After editing the CSV, import back into an arra
Users = Import-CSV c:\temp\Users.csvy
# Assign the Disabled feedback policy to all users loaded from the CSV file
ForEach ($User in $Users) { Grant-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy -Identity $User.UserPrincipalName -Policy Disabled }
# Check that the assignment works
Get-CsOnlineUser | ? {$_.TeamsFeedbackPolicy -eq "Disabled"} | Format-Table DisplayName, TeamsFeedbackPolicy
DisplayName TeamsFeedbackPolicy
----------- -------------------
HR Coordinator Disabled
Nestor Wilke Disabled
Miriam Graham Disabled
HR Management Disabled
Lee Gu Disabled
Diego Siciliani Disabled
To create a custom Teams feedback policy, run the New-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy cmdlet
New-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy -Identity "Tenant Enabled Feedback" -UserInitiatedMode Enabled -ReceiveSurveysMode EnabledUserOverride
You can then assign the new policy to the accounts you want to allow to submit feedback to Microsoft. Remember that you need to assign the appropriate feedback policies to new accounts after their creation.
Not Against Feedback
I’m not against the idea of providing feedback to Microsoft to improve their products. I give feedback on an ongoing and continuous basis, as many a Microsoft product manager can testify. I am against individual user feedback unless the organization has an opportunity to curate and assess the feedback. If an organization wants to do this, it’s easy to create a public team and ask people to submit and discuss their feedback there before giving Microsoft the collective wisdom gathered through internal debate.
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