Manage Polls

Once you have created polls with Poll Designer, you need a tool that allows you to easily organize and maintain these polls. The Poll Manager application provides the functionality that allows you to manage your polls from a single, central location. From the Poll Manager Quick Pick Screen (figure 1), you have instant access to the most important functions related to your polls.

Figure 1: Poll Manager Quick Pick Screen

The functionality provided by this screen includes:

	Edit/Create Polls - open the selected poll in Poll Designer for editing. To learn more about editing polls, see Build Poll Screens.
	Launch - launch the selected poll with the Polling Engine. To learn more about starting polls from Poll Manager, see Run Polls.
	Generate Report - run a report against the selected poll's response data.  To learn more about running reports, see Poll Reporting.
	Backup/Restore - back-up a poll to or restore a poll from an attached disk drive. See below.
	Manage Data - perform routine data management activities on the selected poll's response data. To learn more about data management, see Manage Poll Data.
	Uninstall (Erase) Poll - erase a poll and all of its related data.

Back-up & Restore Polls

To make back-up copies of your polls and to distribute the same poll to multiple kiosks, you must use the Backup/Restore functionality provided by Poll Manager. Choosing the "Backup/Restore" button on the Poll Manager Quick Pick Screen (figure 1) launches the Backup/Restore Utility (figure 2).  From here, you can create a back-up copy of a poll, restore a poll from a back-up copy or merge a back-up copy of a poll with an existing copy of the same poll.

Figure 2: Backup/Restore Utility Window

When you create a back-up copy of a poll, you have the option of backing-up the poll and its response data, the poll only or the response data only. The back-up copy can be written to any internal or external disk drive to which the kiosk has access. When you restore a poll from a back-up copy, the Backup/Restore Utility checks on your machine for a poll with the same name as the back-up copy. If it finds such a poll, you have the option to overwrite the existing poll and its response data or merge the back-up and existing response data (the existing poll is unchanged).

This utility is extremely valuable in an environment where you run the same poll on several different kiosks but wish to consolidate all poll response data in a central location (master computer). In this case, you can merge all of your response data on the master computer by creating back-up copies of the response data on each kiosk and then restoring each back-up copy on the master computer with the merge option.

Block Out Times

PollMaker allows you to manage the availability of individual polls to respondents through the use of Block Out Times. A Block Out Time is a range of time that is set for a specific day of the week during which respondents are not permitted to take a poll. Block Out Times are set in the Block Out Times Dialog in Poll Designer (figure 3).  For example, you can specify that a poll will not available between 5:00 and 11:30 on Saturdays.

Figure 3: Poll Designer - Block Out Times Dialog Box

During a Block Out Time, the Polling Engine stops the poll and displays a message ("This Kiosk Is Temporarily Unavailable"). If a respondent is taking the poll when a Block Out Time is reached, the Polling Engine allows the respondent to finish before the stopping the poll. When the end of the Block Out Time is reached, the Polling Engine resumes the poll, and respondents may once again take the poll.