Asterisk Administrators Guide to VoIP Polycom IP SIP Phones

In this lecture you will see the different model phones available from Polycom. We will review the whole family of phones and dissect each models features. At the end of this lecture be sure to look in the course resources for the Polycom IP phone model matrix guide where it will clearly illistrate the differences between each model phone.

Learn the different ways to configure your Polycom phones and how you can do each one. Throughout this course we will be using a couple different ways to show you in your own enviorment how to effectivly manage this process.

Let's review the back of a Polycom VVX phone to see what the connections look like and what each of them does. This is very important for when you are getting ready to install a physical phone.

In this lesson I will show you how to find the phones IP address on the network so we can use that to access the web configuration interface.

See this optional lesson where I will show you how to configure the VLAN ID from the phone menu system. You don't have to use VLAN's but I like to use them when working in medium to large network environments so the DHCP range does not run out of addresses.

Let's talk about what you will learn during this section of the course.

In this lesson I will show you how to navigate the Polycom web admin and what the different menus do. As I state in the video it is recommend you use FireFox since that browser seems to perform the best with the Polycom web admin. We will also configure all the phones to use the same version of firmware this course was designed for version 4.1.8.

Using my sample configuration files you will add new SIP peers to your Asterisk server so we can configure the phone and all be use the same extension numbers. I am using AstLinux as my Asterisk server which is from my course on how to build a VoIP Business so if you are curious about that course take a look at all the courses I offer.

Using the SIP peers we added to your Asterisk server you will see how to configure a phone using the simple setup menu. This will teach you the basics of how to configure the phone using the web admin.

Learn how to backup the config file from a phone so you can restore it in the future in the event of a problem.

During this section you will learn the details of working with XML configuration files.

In this lecture you will see how to create a BLF key from the web admin. Then we will review the funcaitonalty of how the BLF keys work including adding a call pickup feature to the Asterisk PBX.

During this lesson you will see how to export a config file from a phone and make addtions to it and upload it to the Polycom phone.

In this lesson we will talk about DHCP reservations and how they work as well as where you can configure a DHCP reservation table.

See an example of how to edit the background image of a Polycom phone through the XML config file. See the course resources for the examples.

See how to configure your phones with an NTP server and what timezone the phones reside in. Use the example config included in the course resources.

Learn how you can change the way to handle inbound and outbound phone calls with line appearance buttons. There are 2 different approaches on how to handle phone calls and buttons on the phone. I will show you the default method as well as my preferred method.

In many legacy PBX equipment the systems allow for users to do an intercom call which is a 1 to 1 speaker phone call where the calling party picks the person they want to talk to and dials their number automatically putting the receiving parties phone on speaker. In this lesson I will show you how to configure the phones and how it acually works.

Thank you for taking the course, now use your newfound knowledge to configure your own PBX. Also don't forget to take my other courses if you need further help with Asterisk configuration.