PNP with Polycoms

[Carl Johnson]

I am wanting to swap over to PNP to manage all my phones, currently we use FTP to provision them all. I am curious at what changes really need to take place to make this work properly and that poses these questions:

 

1) Can keep the extensions we currently have for the hard extensions: 1XX

2) From what I read to use PNP you must use TFTP, is there going to be a change to have FTP/HTTP instead?

3) Can the system dialplan be edited, I don't like the generic ones and I want users to dial with a 9, etc so that we can transform as needed and not interfere with extensions

4) When provisioning the defualt config, can that be edited to allow for failover, etc?

[Vodia PBX]

1) Can keep the extensions we currently have for the hard extensions: 1XX

 

Yes, but you need to put the MAC address of the phone into the extensions setting (registration tab).

 

2) From what I read to use PNP you must use TFTP, is there going to be a change to have FTP/HTTP instead?

 

The PBX does not support FTP, and at least in the old firmware versions the only other option was TFTP. But the first small TFTP file does nothing else than redirecting to HTTP. If you are able to direct the phones directly to HTTP, then you should be able to skip TFTP completely.

 

3) Can the system dialplan be edited, I don't like the generic ones and I want users to dial with a 9, etc so that we can transform as needed and not interfere with extensions

 

Yes, there is a seperate file called "diaplans.xml" (I attach the most recent version) which you can edit. If you put that into the html directory of the PBX, it should pick it up during a restart of the service. Don't forget to move this file away if you later make an upgrade and you want to use the default method again.

 

4) When provisioning the defualt config, can that be edited to allow for failover, etc?

 

Yes and no. Firstly, we want to avoid supporting a very broad way of configuring devices to keep the support effort low (that's the "no"). But you can always put other files into the html directory to override the default. You would need to get those files from us, I don't want to post them here.

dialplans.xml

[Vodia PBX]

The latest version 2.1.0.2090 (http://www.pbxnsip.com/download/pbxctrl-2.1.0.2090.exe) includes the possiblity to provision Polycom phones completely by http. This is very useful when the phone is behind NAT that does not support TFTP.