Forum Discussion
Common Area Phones
It is working now but there is still a an issue for Polycom devices.
It looks like that the firmware that is hosted via cloud PBX is incompatible it lacks the CAP options. When you provision a device it signs in that does an firmware downgrade and removes CAP.
I saw the same behavior here. I only have one polycom phone currently, for evaluation/proof of concept purposes. I manually updated it to the latest firmware available from polycom, v5.7.0, only to find that the next day it had rolled back to v5.6.0. I haven't gotten to trying the Common Area Phone licensing yet, so it wasn't a big deal at the time. I assumed that the firmware was just so new it hadn't been updated on the skype servers yet, but it's been almost a month and nothing has changed.
Looks like Microsoft is pushing the 5.6.x firmware to the phone when connected to Skype for Business Online. Check out Martin Boam's experience with CAP Provisioning on his blog, where he mentions how to configure the IP Phone policy to prevent getting the older firmware pushed to the phone:
https://ucmart.uk/2018/03/23/sfb-online-common-area-phone-my-experience-so-far/
In short, you'll want to run Set-CsIPPhonePolicy -EnableDeviceUpdate $false in order to stop the lower firmware from getting installed on the phone after 900 seconds of inactivity.
Also, there is some good news. Polycom literally just yesterday released the newer 5.7.1 firmware for the various VVX models, so may be worth trying that out.
Well, I finally got around to doing some testing of my own today, using a Polycom VVX 600, on software version 5.7.1.2205.
At this time, I was able to successfully provision the phone using an "In Cloud" account created directly in our Office 365 tenant. However, as we operate in a hybrid configuration with Skype for Business Server 2015 in our environment, I was hoping this would also work for an account synced from our Active Directory and enabled with the required "Common Area Phone" license. This did not work, unfortunately, and produced the same error as before, seen below.
I was hoping for a complete success, but will take progress where I can get it. Hopefully Microsoft will allow this to work with synced accounts just as well as "In Cloud" accounts.
Has anybody had any luck in getting this to provision successfully with an account synced from your Active Directory and assigned the "Common Area Phone" license?As you had experienced this exactly the same as I did in our own environment, I as wondering if you had done any additional testing since these past few updates. Really curious to hear if you have the same results of success with an "In Cloud" account and still no luck/same results/error as previously seen with a synced account.
