### Responding to polls and votings

As the creator of a poll, you may want to announce the start of voting by including the link to the poll in a Web page or by distributing it via email, especially when it is a public poll. In this case, you should publish the public link to the poll for anonymous voters, i.e.

http://your-bscw-server/pub/bscw.cgi/poll-id

For authenticated voters with access to the workspace containing the poll, you should advise the use of the ‘authenticated’ access to the poll, i.e. the link

http://your-bscw-server/bscw/bscw.cgi/poll-id

where poll-id is the object id of the poll – to be found as the last number of the URL shown in the address field of your browser when you open the poll. If in doubt, ask your BSCW administrator about the correct links.

With a voting, start and change of the voting period are automatically announced to the participants via email, you need not to become active in this respect.

You as the organizer of a voting may send an email message to the participants.

• Select Send to Participants in the action menu of the voting, enter your message and hit [OK]. You may send the message to all participants, all participants having already voted or not voted yet, or select certain participants to receive your message.

Note that not only the organizer, i.e. creator of a voting, but also the manager of a workspace that contains the voting can send messages to the participants.

In order to respond to a poll, you either click on the link published as described above. When you want to respond to a voting, you click on the link which you received via email. If you have access to the workspace of the poll or voting you

• choose Open in the action menu of the poll or voting or click on the respective entry in the folder listing. This will show the questionnaire.

• Fill in the questionnaire and hit [Submit response] when you are finished. All questions which are marked with an asterisk (*) as mandatory have to be answered, otherwise the response will not be not accepted.

Answers to a poll will then be final and cannot be revised any more. With votings, you can still change your mind (see below).

• At last, the results so far received will be shown if the poll or voting is configured so that participants may access the results.

Responding to a poll or voting is only possible if its time frame has started and not yet expired. Each potential participant in a poll may only vote once. In case of a public poll this is achieved by setting a browser cookie. Participants of a voting can change their mind:

• Open the voting and click [Change your mind] at the top of the questionnaire and vote again.