So I have been playing around with the Polycom VVX IP Phones more and more lately and with the new features that are coming in the next few months I think this could become the go-to phone for Lync deployments that need IP Phones on the desk.
So of the features that I like include:
- Touch Screen for user authentication
- Ability to us Lync PIN number for authentication
- With UC Software release 4.1 or better the address book is downloaded to the phone, so no need to do anything with number normalisation/dial plans on the VVX phone
- Retrieve Lync server root certificate automatically using DHCP Option 43
Currently to upgrade the phone you can either do it manually (not a problem is you only have a few phones) or can use a provisioning server. The provisioning server, from what I have found can be:
- FTP (Default)
- TFTP
- HTTP
- HTTPS
- FTPS
To define the host for your provisioning server you can use DHCP option 66 (Boot Server Host Name) option 66 is a string value, by default the VVX phones will use FTP to download the configuration file and any firmware updates.
The default username and password for the VVX phones to use for the FTP session is defined within some of the Polycom support documents, OR you can use the same DHCP option 66 with the format "username:password@FTP Server IP/Hostname", without the quotes, this will allow you to define the username and password. One word of warning this username and password is passed via clear text in the DHCP messages so it can easily be found.
Some Polycom pages that i found useful include:
