snom UC edition phones support for in-band provisioning overcomes today’s provisioning limitations and challenges. Until now, mass provisioning of Lync qualified phones has been time consuming and expensive. Other IP phone developers require additional infrastructure elements such as DHCP servers or third party equipment to provision their Lync qualified phones.
“This breakthrough solves a major configuration and customisation challenge for customers deploying Lync with voice,” said Michael Knieling, COO of snom. “snom UC edition phones can be managed natively via Lync Server without the need for additional servers or provisioning tools.”
snom phones leverage an integrated Lync Server feature called csClientPolicyEntry, which allows an administrator to add custom settings to any csClientPolicy. Until now, this dormant feature was used as a means to push seldom-used settings to Lync clients. Now users specific settings like language, time zone, function keys and screen contrast are defined and then a Lync PowerShell script is run to create a new policy. This policy is then assigned to an individual user, a group of users or to specific locations via the Lync PowerShell. This advancement eliminates the cost and complexity of mass provisioning, enabling administrators to avoid the cost of additional hardware, software, training and maintenance.
“snom UC edition’s use of csClientPolicyEntries is pure genius,” wrote Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Matt Landis on his blog windowspbx.blogspot.com. “It marks the first time Lync administrators can push out IP phone preferences directly and efficiently from a Lync server. This may just be the feature that makes snom UC edition & Lync qualified devices more optimised than Lync optimised devices.”
In-band provisioning is one of several ways that enterprise customers can provision snom phones. Customers can choose the option that works best for them, depending on their applications, size of deployment, and whether the phones are in different locations. Other options include TR-069 server, other third-party provisioning servers or snomtastic server management software.