Polycom GroupSeries 5.0 Update for Skype4B and Office365

Polycom has recently released its latest 5.0 firmware version for the Group Series Room Telepresence systems. Among the new features that come with this new version, the two most important are support for content receive over RDP Skype for Business and Lync 2013 as well as Office365 Exchange Online calendaring support. Note that Skype for Business Online is not yet supported with this release and Polycom's plan of intent is to support it in H1 2016. For now, companies need to have a hybrid configuration where Skype for Business is installed on-premise while utilizing Exchange Online for email and calendaring. This article walks through the configuration of the Group Series 5.0 firmware for Exchange Online in 2 scenarios: using a standard O365 user account; and using an Exchange Online Resource mailbox which requires no licenses.

In the first scenario, we are using an user account that was first created on the on-premise Active Directory (AD) and then synchronized to Office365 via DirSync. We then homed the account on the on-premise Skype for Business Server while creating an Exchange online mailbox. Details on how to change the default SMTP address to match the shared SIP address space was discussed in this earlier article and will not be repeated here. Since we are using a user account we need to assign O365 licenses in order to create the mailbox.
Once the mailbox and Skype4B account is ready, we can start to configure the Group Series. Navigate to the Servers->Calendaring Service menu and configure the information as shown below:

As shown above, we only need to enter the Primary SMTP and the User Name and password into the respective fields. The "Domain" field is not necessary when registering to Office365. If we have already created a Skype4B account then we can choose to autodiscover using the SIP Server, otherwise choosing the E-mail Address option will work as well. Clicking on the "Auto Discover" button should automatically populate the Microsoft Exchange Server field as "outlook.office365.com". Once registered successfully we can see the Registration Status as "Registered" and below is a screen capture of the Group Series calendar home page:

 Note that for the on-premise Skype for Business account, we match the SIP Address of the Group Series to the Primary SMTP address as this simplifies the scheduling of meetings and also allows the presence status of the Group Series to be shown in Outlook. The SIP account configuration is shown below for reference, but no changes has been made to this since the previous release:

In the second scenario, we use an Exchange Online Resource mailbox instead of a standard user account. Doing this can be desirable as Exchange resource mailboxes do not require any Office365 licenses. This is done by simply creating a Resource Mailbox using the Exchange Online Admin portal. Once the resource mailbox is created, a corresponding account will be created in the Office365 Admin Portal. We then need to reset the password since it is required for the Group Series to register to Exchange Online:

Once we have the password for the Resource mailbox we can configure the Group Series to register to Exchange Online as shown below. Note that we have changed the SMTP address to match the SIP domain suffix but the UPN has to use the "domain.onmicrosoft.com" suffix since this account was not synchronized from our on-premise AD:

There are some additional steps to make the calendar account more user-friendly for display on the Group Series. This includes removing the Organizer name from the Subject as well as preventing Private Meetings from being displayed. This can be done using the Exchange Online Remote Powershell cmdlets as shown below:

This concludes the walkthrough of configuring the Polycom Group Series 5.0 for Exchange Online. For the RDP Content receive feature, no special configuration is required other than registering the system to a Skype for Business or Lync 2013 Server. The Group Series can receive RDP content share in both P2P and multiparty AVMCU calls.