Using Poly Lens to Provision and Manage MS Teams SIP GW phones

Customers with legacy Poly SIP phones can now use Poly Lens cloud management platform to centrally provision Poly phones such as the 3PIP certified VVX Business Media Phones for the new Microsoft SIP GW for Teams interop. Poly Lens will be proxying the provisioning toward Microsoft SIP gateway service, while also still providing the ability of Lens to deliver configurations beyond what is available on the MS Teams Admin Center (TAC). Best part of this is that the Lens management platform and all its capabilities are available completely free of charge.

This feature is exclusive to Poly's non-native Teams phones and enables a cloud-to-cloud integration between Poly Lens and the Microsoft Teams Admin Center. This integration provides administrators with increased control and customization options for devices that register with the Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway Service. After it has been applied to the device (or devices), Poly Lens will retrieve on behalf of the device all of the settings from the Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway and apply them as a component of the device's Configuration Policy. Settings from Microsoft will have the highest precedence over all other policy layers and can be viewed in the My Settings view of any device enabled with the setting. This view is accessible on all devices. It is indicated by the presence of a lock icon next to this label, which indicates that it cannot be edited or removed using Poly Lens. This feature is not accessible unless Poly Lens's Device Provisioning feature has first been used to add the device in question to the system.

Currently the Poly Voice devices that support Microsoft Teams SIP GW with this feature include:

• Poly Trio 8500, Trio 8800
• Poly VVX 600, VVX 601
• Poly VVX 500, VVX 501
• Poly VVX 400, VVX 401, VVX 410, VVX 411, VVX 450
• Poly VVX 300, VVX 301, VVX 310, VVX 311, VVX 350
• Poly VVX 201, VVX 250
• Poly VVX 150

In our lab environment, we have a Poly VVX601 phone that is configured in Generic Profile (OpenSIP mode) that will be configured to use the Lens Assisted MS SIP GW integration feature. To provision the phone via, Lens we first need the provisioning information which is unique for each tenant and this can be found in the Lens portal as shown in the diagram below:

Configure Lens Provisioning for Phone
To configure lens provisioning for the VVX phone, we should be using DHCP option 160 using the provisioning URL obtained above. However, for this lab, we will simply configure the provisioning URL directly on the phone using the web admin interface as shown:

The phone may reboot several times and once the phone has been provisioned in Lens, we will be able to see the device listed in the Lens inventory page:

Enable Lens Assisted Provisioning Feature
Once the phone has been provisioned in Lens, we can begin to configure Lens assisted provisioning for MS Teams SIP GW. In the Poly Lens portal https://lens.poly.com, sign in as the administrator and perform the following steps

1. Go to Manage > Inventory.
2. Select the VVX phone that was just provisioned:
3. Note: The device must have a State of Provisioned or Provisioned (Active).
4. Select Settings > Integrations > Microsoft Teams from the side tab.
5. Note: The Settings option is not available until Device Provisioning is enabled. See Enable Device Provisioning on an Account.
6. Once the Enable Lens Assisted Provisioning Feature is enabled, additional options are displayed.
7. Set the SIP Gateway Region from the dropdown list (Americas, EMEA, and APAC).
8. Set the Device Language from the dropdown list (English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, or Portuguese).
9. Click Apply.

Once the "Apply" button is clicked, the phone will reboot and begin configuring itself as a Teams SIP GW phone via Lens as a proxy. The main advantage is that Lens continues to be the management platform for the phone and administrators can leverage all the Lens features to manage the phone from a central location. For example, we can enable remote monitoring on the phone using the Lens portal by enabling the Screen Capture feature:

At this point, the VVX is ready for sign in to the Teams SIP GW service as shown in the home screen below:

We simply open a browser and sign in using the code shown in the phone. Once sign-in is successful, the phone is ready for use with Teams via the SIP GW service and still being centrally managed and provisioned by Poly Lens. ​The phone also appears in the Teams Admin Center under the SIP Devices section as shown below: