If you’re ever putting together documentation, training material or blog posts on Teams Phones, you don’t want to be in a situation where you are taking photos of the screen of the phone with a camera. Instead it’s always better to get a crisp and clear pixel perfect screen shot. Fortunately, Teams phone devices allow you to do this, however, it’s not very well documented. In this blog post I’m going to take you through the process of taking screen captures on Microsoft Teams phones and also introduce you to a tool that I created for taking screen shots and animated GIFs of your Teams Phone devices.
Teams Phone Screen Capture
Tool
The Teams
Phone Screen Capture Tool was created to both make screen captures easier to
take and also to create fully marked up animated GIFs of your Teams Phone
Screen for documentation, blog posts, training material, etc.
- Capture jpeg images of static screen images.
- Capture animated GIF screen captures
- Edit the length of captured GIFs
- Resize captured GIFs
- Markup captured GIFs with rectangles or circle shapes in multiple colours
- Currently supports Poly and Yealink devices. AudioCodes is not supported yet due to their current implementation methodology.
Version 1.01:
- Updated to support for non-Teams CCX and VVX phones
- Support for PowerShell Version 7
Version
1.00: Initial Release
How to Enable the Screen
Capture Feature on Teams Phones
The screen
capture feature is enabled on each of the Teams phone brands in a slightly
different way. I have created a walk through for how it’s done on each device
brand.
Screen Capture with Poly
Teams Phones
Step 1:
Navigate to Settings > Device Settings > Debug > Screen Capture
Step 2:
Navigate to Settings > Device Settings > Admin Only > (Enter Password) > Network
Configuration > Web User Interface
Step 3: Open the Teams Phone Screen Capture
Tool in PowerShell:
IPAddress: Enter the IP Address of the Poly Phone.
Phone Type: Poly
Password: <“456”
is the Poly default>
Click the “Show Screen Button”
The tool will then try to connect with the
details given. Once connected you should see the screen in real time:
Now you can Save a Screenshot or record an animated GIF.
Screen Capture with Yealink
Teams Phones
Step 1: Navigate to Settings > Device Settings > Admin > (Enter Password) > Debug > Screen Capture > Enable
Step 2: Open the Teams Phone Screen Capture
Tool in PowerShell:
IPAddress: Enter the IP Address of the Yealink Phone
Phone Type:
Yealink
Password: <“admin”
is the Yealink default>
Click the “Show Screen Button”
The tool will then try to connect with the
details given. Once connected you should see the screen in real time:
Now you can Save a Screenshot or record an animated GIF.
Screen Capture with AudioCodes
Teams Phones
The AudioCodes Teams phones don’t offer the same web-based access to their screen captures taken on a device. For this reason the tool does not support them at the moment. If you do want to take a screen capture on an AudioCodes phone you can but it’s a bit more work. You’ll need an SSH client (Putty will do) and a TFTP client in order to pull down a copy of the screen shot off the phone.
Here are
the steps required:
Step 1: Turn on the Screen Capture setting
in the phone: Settings > Device
Settings > Device Administratoion > (Enter Password) > Debugging >
Screen Capture
Step 2: Access the phone via SSH
Note: The default username/password is "admin"/"admin".
Step 3: Run a TFTP client on your PC
Step 4: Run the commands from the SSH
command line:
screencap /sdcard/screen_cap.png
curl -T /sdcard/screen_cap.png tftp://host_ip
These commands will make the phone take a screen capture which is saved onto the phone. Then the second command sends the screen capture to your TFTP server which you need to have running and accepting inbound file transfers.
This is not the most elegant of solutions
and I hope that AudioCodes adds a web-based method for accessing the screen
shots in the future.
GIF Editing Studio
After you have finished capturing the GIF a new window will be displayed that allows you to edit the GIF. The screen looks like this:
You can change the length of the animated GIF by changing the "Start Frame" and "End Frame" values underneath the image on the left hand side of the interface. The start and end frames selected will be reflected in the final GIF that is exported from the tool. The "Image Size" value allow you to change the height of the image when you change the height the width will be automatically changed to match. If you are making a long animated GIF then it can be useful to reduce the size of the output in order to keep the file size down on the exported GIF. By default the GIF will loop for an infinite amount of time if you would like it to only loop once you un-check the "Infinite Loop" checkbox.
Teams Admin Portal - Device Setting
You can control the Screen Capture setting that each of the phone brands devices need turned on in order to get access the screen capture images. The setting is found in the Devices > IP Phones > Configuration Profiles (tab) > + Add > Screen Capture:
This allows you to push this setting out to phones if that is how you want to do it. Keep in mind though that the Web User Interface setting required for Poly phones to support screen capturing is not available from the Admin Portal.
The Wrap Up
There you go, a new tool for your screen capturing pleasure. Enjoy!