I’ve just downloaded (from codeplex) and had a look at the Polling Web Part by Phil Wicklund. We’ve a customer who wants exactly this sort of functionality – surveys are too heavy weight; they just want a little radio-button panel. That’s what the Polling Web Part does:

Cool. And it shows it’s results as:

Hmm. So how does it store it’s data? Well, that seems to me a little strange – each poll, options and responses are a single row in a list:

Bit strange if you ask me. Some consequences of this are that:

• You can’t have more than 5 options
• You can’t be sure that someone doesn’t respond twice (although it appears that a cookie is set to prevent that from being too easy).
• Curiously, you can’t tell the web part to point to a particular poll question. It appears to always point to the latest. It’d be nice to have a drop down to select the poll in the Web Part Toolbox menu.

I must confess that I’d have considered having different polls in different lists, and reading the values available out of a Choice column on that list. Each response would be a List Item, so you’d know if someone has already created one. Still, Phil’s approach is probably quicker to process.

Other thoughts – well, it’d be nice to have bar chart rendering too.

All of which is, I must point out, quite picky. It does what it does well, and is free, and the source code is available; I may try and have a look at that at some time.