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When I attempted to sign it into Microsoft Teams I was greeted with an error that said the Company Portal software was out of date and needed updating: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!

Read more →

Microsoft Teams Phone Hotline (Bling) Feature

Microsoft released a new feature for Teams Phone! The feature is called Hotline or PLAR (Private Line Auto Ringdown – for those that must have an obscure acronym for a feature that already has the perfect name). The feature is very simple, but will certainly help with Common Area Phone deployments. In some cases, you just want a phone to do one job and that is to ring to one specific location when it’s picked up. This allows you to mount the phone in a public place and not worry about people using it to call another people within your organisation (or even worse, to make an expensive external call).

Requirements

• The Teams Phone device must be running at least version: 1449/1.0.94.2023082303 of the Teams Phone software.
• The phone account must be a given a Microsoft Teams Shared Devices license. This feature does not exist for a personal login from a regular user. 

• The hotline can be set up to ring either a contact or a phone number (both options are described below).
• The Advanced Calling feature must be turned off in order to use the Hotline feature.
• From my experience, configuration profiles only get pushed to devices at the time they are added to the device or when you update a setting(s) in a configuration profile that is already assigned to a device. If you go and manually assign settings on the phone and then later update the Configuration Profile that is assigned to the device, the manual setting will be overridden by the policy.

 

Configuration

The feature is inbuilt in the Teams Phone software. There are two methods for getting the configuration on to the device. The first is to configure it directly on the device via the settings screen. The second is to push the configuration to the device using a Configuration Profile within the Teams Admin Centre. I will explain both below:

 

Option 1. Configuration on Device:

On the Device go to Settings > Device settings > Admin only > Calling > Hotline

 

Within the settings you get an Enable toggle and the contact that you want the Hotline to ring to. When you switch on the enable toggle, the phone reboots, so it's best if you first configure the contact information before enabling hotline:

When you enter the Configured Contact area you will see a Contact Picker dialog. From here you can type in Contact Names:

Or, if you type in a phone number that the system can normalise, it will allow you to select it also:

Add a Display Name that will make sense to the user that's using the hotline phone, because this name is displayed on the screen of the device when in it's idle mode:

Once it’s added, you will just see the Display Name in the Configured Contact area and not the number or contact that it's actually going to call (so when you're troubleshooting this config in the future, it's always good to open the configured contact to make sure it's going to the place you expect): 

The phone will now restart and you should see the following on the screen. (Note, the last word "emergency" is the display name you configured):

 

Option 2. Configuration via the Teams Admin Centre:

You can find the settings for phone devices under the Teams Devices > Phones area within the Teams Admin Centre:

In this setting you turn on the Hotline toggle and then enter a contact and a Display Name:

If you want to dial an external number you need to make sure that when you click on the "Search for a Contact" field you click the very difficult to see Configure Contact Manually “button” at the bottom of the drop down:

When you do this the Admin Centre will allow you to create a contact object with a phone number associated with it that will become the destination of the hotline:

Now you can save your Configuration profile and go and assign it to the Common Area Phone. From the All Phones tab, select the phone you want to assign the profile to and click the Assign Configuration button:

A fly out window will now appear from the right of screen that ask you to type in the profile name. (You need to  remember at least the first 3 characters of the name you assigned). Select the profile from the list it provides as you type:

 Apply the setting. As a tip, if you want to know which configuration profile is assigned to your phones, you have to scroll to the far right of the device list (it’s not really obvious that these additional columns are hidden over there). You will see, in this case, that the Common Area phone has the "Hotline" profile I assigned:

 

Note: After assigning a configuration policy you may have to wait for 15 mins or more for it to be pushed out to the device. You can see in the device history area that the update is queued. Once it’s complete, the device history will show the status as Successful:

 

Here’s an example of the feature working on the phone:

Note: This GIF is made with my Teams Phone Screen Capture tool: https://www.myteamslab.com/2020/10/teams-phone-screen-capture-tool.html

 Notice in the animation above, when the call is answered the caller doesn't get any features like Hold or Transfer. However, the person answering the call still gets these options in case they want to transfer to someone else, etc.

The Wrap Up

Whilst this process is simple enough, there are steps that aren’t particularly intuitive. Hopefully this has clarified things for you and you can get on with your Hotline Bling.

Read more →