Roles and permissions for Teams and presentations

Overview

Polly has two kinds of roles, and they control different things. Your Team role decides what you can do in a Team, like creating content, inviting people or managing billing. Your role on a presentation or polly decides what you can do with that one item, like editing it, presenting it or managing who has access.

Type of role	What it controls	Roles	Where to change it
Team role	What you can do in a Team	Owner, Editor, Viewer	Profile menu → Manage Team
Role on a presentation or polly	What you can do with one presentation, polly or template	Owner, Can edit, Can view	Share → Collaborators

These roles apply to presentations in the Polly web app, PowerPoint and Google Slides, and to pollys and templates created on the web. Polls, surveys, quizzes and Q&A created from Slack use their own collaborator roles (Can Manage and Can View), covered in a separate article.

Team roles

Everyone in a shared Team is an Owner, Editor or Viewer. New members join as Viewers. Everyone also has a personal team that only they can see.

What you can do in the Team	Owner	Editor	Viewer
See every presentation, polly, template and theme in the Team	Yes	Yes	Yes
Save templates and themes, create labels, upload images	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create presentations and pollys	Yes	Yes	No
Invite people to the Team and resend invites	Yes	Yes	No
Change a member between Viewer and Editor	Yes	Yes, except the Owner and yourself	No
Move a presentation or polly you own into or out of the Team	Yes	Yes	No
Cancel a pending invite	Yes	No	No
Remove a member from the Team	Yes	No	No
Manage billing, seats and licenses	Yes	No	No
Add billing admins	Yes	No	No

✏️Note: Your Team role never lets you edit a specific presentation or polly on its own. To edit one, you need Can edit on that item. See How Team roles and item roles work together below.

Removing someone from the Team also ends their access to the Team's presentations and pollys. Billing admins can manage billing alongside the Owner.

To leave a Team, transfer Team ownership, rename a Team or delete it, contact Polly Support.

Roles on a presentation or polly

Each presentation, polly or template has exactly one Owner, the person who created it. Everyone else you share it with gets Can edit or Can view.

These roles cover presentations on the web, in PowerPoint and in Google Slides, including every polly slide inside them. Slides follow the presentation's roles and can't be shared on their own. They also cover Question, Survey, Quiz and Q&A pollys created on the web, and presentation and polly templates.

Each role includes everything the role below it can do.

Can view: view and present

Everyone with access to a presentation or polly can:

Open it and see results
See who has access, with names and emails
Present it and run the live session
Save a presentation as a template

Can edit: everything above, plus edit and share

Edit content, title and settings
End the live session, reset results and close a Q&A
Moderate Q&A questions
Export results
Duplicate it
Save a polly as a template
Post a presentation to Slack
Invite collaborators as Can edit or Can view
Give the whole Team access
Change someone from Can view to Can edit

Owner: everything above, plus full control

Change someone from Can edit to Can view
Remove a collaborator or remove Team access
Post a polly to Slack
Move it to another Team
Delete it
Transfer ownership of a presentation

Can view is read-only, but it still lets someone present. Give Can view to a speaker or facilitator who only needs to run your session.

✏️Note: To duplicate a presentation or polly, you also need to be an Owner or Editor of its Team. Some actions, like exporting results, depend on your plan.

How Team roles and item roles work together

When more than one role applies to you, you get whichever gives you more access.

Everyone in the Team can view. Anything created in a shared Team gets Team access set to Can view, so every member can open and present it. The creator is its Owner.
Editing needs your own Can edit. Being a Team Editor lets you create your own presentations and pollys. To edit someone else's, they need to give you Can edit on that item.
Team access is always Can view. It can add access for the whole Team but never takes anyone's access away. To give someone edit access, invite them individually as Can edit.
Can edit can upgrade your Team role. If a Team Viewer is given Can edit on a presentation or polly, they also become a Team Editor, as long as a seat is available.
Items stay inside their Team. People outside a Team can only get access by joining it. If you invite someone by email to something in your personal team, it moves into a shared Team first.

Example: Anne is an Editor in the Marketing Team. She can create her own presentations and open every presentation in the Team. When Sam shares his webinar deck with her as Can edit, she can also edit that deck. She still can't remove Sam's other collaborators or delete the deck, because only the Owner can.

Inviting people and default roles

The role someone starts with depends on whether they're already in your Team.

When you invite	They start as
Someone already in your Team	Can edit by default (you can pick Can view instead)
Someone outside your Team, by email	Can view. You can change them to Can edit after they join.
Anyone as Owner	Not possible through an invite. Use Transfer ownership instead.

People you invite from outside the Team also join the Team as Viewers. People who are new to Polly get an email invite, and the link expires after 7 days.

💡Tip: Everyone in one invite gets the same role. To add some people as Can edit and others as Can view, send two invites.

Transferring ownership and leaving

Transfer ownership (presentations only). The Owner can hand a presentation to a collaborator. Open Share → Collaborators, click the role next to their name and choose Make owner. You become a Can edit collaborator once you confirm, and the transfer can't be undone. Ownership of pollys created on the web can't be transferred yet.

Leave a presentation or polly. Collaborators with Can edit or Can view can leave at any time. The Owner can't leave, so transfer ownership first if you no longer want to own it.

Seats

On a paid plan, Owners and Editors use a paid seat and Viewers are free. The same applies on a presentation or polly: Owner and Can edit need a seat, and Can view doesn't.

If your Team has no free seat, people you give edit access to join as Viewers until the Owner or a billing admin adds a seat.