AudioCodes Microsoft Teams Phone Manual Update

The other day I pulled out an AudioCodes C450HD that hadn’t been plugged in for a while. When I attempted to sign it into Microsoft Teams I was greeted with an error that said the Company Portal software was out of date and needed updating:

 

The phone was recommending that I should update it through the Google Play store. Given that Microsoft Teams phones don’t have the Google Play store on them, I could see that this was going to be a problem. The phone also was unable to be logged into Teams, so I wasn’t going to be able to update it using the Teams service via the regular update method. I figured that a manual process was going to be required.

After doing some searching on the web I came to realise that the manual update process for these phones was not documented anywhere that I could find. I did find a random PDF that talked about a tool called the “Teams Phone Utility” which I hadn’t come across before. Unfortunately, no amount of googling seemed like it was going to allow me to find or download this tool.

After hunting around on the AudioCodes software download site and looking through every folder on there, I was able to find a couple of different versions of firmware for the C450HD phone. These were not named in such a way that I could use to understand which software would be used for the upgrade process. In the search, I also stumbled upon a folder called the “Teams IPP Utility”, that contained a tool called the “Android Phone Tool” which did sound promising.

I downloaded a copy of the tool and after opening it, it looked just like the tool that I had seen in the PDF, it was just named differently. Now it was time to randomly guess how to use the tool. I put in the IP Address of the phone and went with the Username and Password of “admin” and clicked the "SSH Connect" button. Low and behold, it was connected:

 

As mentioned earlier, there was a couple of different types of firmware that I had found on the AudioCodes software site. Some of them were ZIP files and others were IMG files. I noticed that the tool seemed to only accept ZIP or APK file types for upgrade. I went with the ZIP file. I also noticed that there was a couple of different kinds of ZIP files. One named C450HD_AN and one there named C450HD_TEAMS.

If you open the zip file it has the following item inside:

I figured that I had better go with the TEAMS named file as the other ones may be a generic android load. So I downloaded the TEAMS version and selected it as the “Firmware file (zip)” file:

The firmware version was shown in the tool so it appeared that it could read the ZIP file and didn’t immediately fail. Now the moment of truth, I clicked the Submit button. The tool then popped a message saying “Processing the update package. This may take a few minutes”

So I waited. After a few minutes it told me that the process had completed successfully:

Nothing up until this point had happened on the screen of the phone which was a bit disconcerting. After a few more seconds a popup showed up on the screen:

After this the phone took a while and then rebooted and came up with the latest software version! Success!

Note: After upgrading the phone I noticed that there was a setting in newer versions of software for turning on SSH in the Debugging menu of the phone. You will need to turn this on in order for the tool to connect:

 

The Wrap Up

There you have it, simply keep looking and guessing and you too can find the answer to almost every problem. Hopefully this post saves you all the searching and guessing part 😊 Adios!

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