VOIP Supply On (almost) Provisioning Polycom Phones

Kyle Brocious over at the VOIP Insider blog wrote a good post describing as he puts it, “How To: Upload Firmware to a Polycom Unit.”

It’s a solid example of setting up a TFTP server to load new firmware to a Polycom SoundPoint SIP phone. I’ve been doing this for years.

It’s not quite a complete example of provisioning the phone as it doesn’t address loading the phones configuration from XML files on the server.

Provisioning from XML files requires only a little knowledge of XML, but some attention to the config file settings. Polycom provides excellent example config files in each firmware distribution.

There’s a file that provides a default suite of settings common to all the phones handled by the server. Then a file unique to each phone that provides the settings specific to that phone. These are called “override” settings as they trump the shared settings.

Some people may never face the provisioning challenge since several of the newer Asterisk appliances support automatic provisioning.