Common Area Phones

Copper Contributor

Hi 

 

Was wonder if and when common area phones will be supported with Skype Online and what people are doing in the interirm. 

 

Are you assigning generic ID's and logging into them?

 

Thanks

LT

30 Replies

O365 support have confirmed that this is a known issue on their backend infrastructure, and a fix is expected W/C: 2nd April

I just tested, and can confirm it's working great now!

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.

@Steve Whitcher

@Wayne Stuebing

 

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.

 

SfBOnline_CAP_Provisioning_OnPrem_Error_2.png

 

 

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?

 

@Kevin Prudhoe

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.

@Alexander Grinman

Yup, getting the same thing here. Works fine for full Cloud accounts but doesn't work for hybrid accounts we get the same error your seeing.  I'm guessing its due to resetting the password when the phone is provisioned.

 

Still not had MS support come back to say it's resolved, so will raise the question with them when they do.

 

 

I can confirm the Firmware issue still exists on Polycom - we also saw the same "An error occured" using skypecap provisioning, used workaround aka/ms/sphone.

Anybody else heard anything from support ?

I will create a support ticket raising this issue again.

To folks that are on Hybrid setups, are you'll creating the CAP account in AD and syncing it to O365, or creating an O365-only account for these?

 

In case of the latter, how are you telling Skype On-Prem to send the calls to the Online user? There has to be some pointer to forward the calls to Skype Online, right?

We are creating the account in AD and having it sync to O365.

 

As far as the phone working with the CAP SKU licensing all is good. Just can not get the provisioning working as others have mentioned it appears to fail whilst trying to change the password.

 

We currently login in as the CAP account by going to the polycom web gui and logging in as the user. Would be nice if the provisioning worked as designed.

 

Is there any update on this functionality?

 

Larry

Has anyone been successful getting the provisioning to work on a Polycom VVX phone? I have tried several different times and not had a successful provisioning. I have a ticket open with Microsoft but they seem to be slow playing the problem.