What's New

In January, we announced a new integration with Microsoft Office 365 Calendars which unlocked Meeting Behavior Insights within Poly Lens for all major meeting providers. To continue our commitment to enhancing workplace collaboration, today, we are excited to announce another major addition to the Poly Lens Office 365 Calendar integration. This new enhancement provides a new centralized window into scheduled room meetings throughout the workplace. Effortlessly use the Poly Lens admin portal to see when your meeting rooms are booked or available so you can schedule needed maintenance, tackle a service ticket, or even swap out the room furniture, all without interrupting any scheduled meetings.

Dive into Today's Calendar and Beyond​

The centerpiece of this update is the new Calendar Viewer, offered in two perspectives: Today’s Calendar and 7-Day Calendar. These calendar views mirror the familiar organization of calendar events found in most common calendaring-based solutions. You can now effortlessly view scheduled meetings, track open room availability, and identify meeting events across various timeframes. We also added some other neat features that allow you to see recurring meetings, overlapping meetings, who the organizer is, how many people are invited, start and end times, extra time zone options, and who the meeting provider is such as Teams, Zoom, Poly, and many more.

Making Room Management Easier with Poly Lens​

With the new Room Calendar views, monitoring a large conference room and Poly devices, while troubleshooting with onsite IT before the start of the next meeting is easily managed. This usually requires checking multiple sources to see when the next meeting is scheduled and who scheduled it, so you can perform the necessary room maintenance in time before the next meeting starts. Now, with Poly Lens, simply go to the Room in Poly Lens and go to Today’s Calendar to review any open times and/or identify the next meeting organizer. With this information, you can communicate with them immediately that the equipment needs maintenance. These key moments are made simpler with Poly Lens by providing key pieces of information in a single pane of glass.

With the surfacing of room availability and tie-in with Meeting Behavior Insights, you can proactively identify space optimization opportunities and implement impact-limiting maintenance strategies.

Today's Calendar​

7-Day Calendar​

Getting Started​

To learn how to enable the Office 365 Calendar Integration, visit Office 365 Calendar Overview.

Once completed and you’ve successfully Linked a Calendar to Poly Lens Rooms, sit back and wait for the specified room and its calendar events to synchronize.

For more information on the Office 365 Integration, visit Office 365 Calendar Details.

Upgrade and access all your Poly Lens Premium Lens Features today and unlock the full potential of your meeting spaces with Poly Lens and Microsoft Office 365 Calendar Integration.

In about a month, Poly CCX desk phones and the Poly Trio C60 conference phone will have access to Poly Voice Software (PVOS) 9.0, a major software update that not only includes some great new features, security improvements, and a bunch of squashed bugs but PVOS 9.0 will also include an operating system update from the Android Open-Source Project moving from version 9 to 12.

Although your day-to-day experience with your phones may change very little as there are no significant visual updates from Poly or partner applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, there are some important points that phone administrators and service providers should consider before updating.

Review your Poly Lens Software Update Policy - Returning to PVOS versions prior to 9.0 has limitations.

Your communication needs are critical to your organization, and we understand it's important that you can experience Poly software before implementing widespread changes. Poly Voice Software has always been backwards compatible and PVOS 9.0 continues to provide a way to return to earlier versions if desired, however, due to the nature of the changes, backwards compatibility will require use of a one-time downgrade package that will transition from the Android 12 OS back to Android 9 used on earlier PVOS versions.

The downgrade process includes a file system format that clears user data and many configuration settings. You will need to sign-in to your devices again or re-apply many settings that are not delivered from a device management solution like Poly Lens or your service provider.

The following information is not retained when converting from PVOS 9.0 to earlier PVOS releases:

• Microsoft Teams sign-in information
• Zoom Phone (CCX) and Zoom Rooms Connector (Poly Trio C60) sign-in information
• Poly Studio X series video bar pairing
• Poly Trio C60 daisy-chain pairing
• Paired Bluetooth devices
• Configuration changes made or imported from the web interface
• Basic configuration settings such as ringtones, power saving options, paging group preferences
• SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol) server and client configuration (certificates installed using SCEP are retained)
• Web Proxy configuration

With this in mind, we suggest you check the software policies you’ve setup in Poly Lens. If you are using Auto-Update, your phones will upgrade to PVOS 9.0 and Android 12 as soon as it is available.

Microsoft Teams Certification​

Poly is committed to supporting the Teams experience and has submitted the Poly CCX and Trio C60 for renewal under the Microsoft Teams Device Certification Program. Although PVOS 9.0.0 will be released in advance of certification, we welcome use by our Teams community and support from Poly is available should you encounter any issues.

For more details on the Microsoft Teams Device Certification program, Microsoft support of Teams devices, and certification dates, refer to Microsoft Teams Certified Devices

Microsoft Intune ending support for Android device administrator on devices with GMS (Google Mobile Services)​

Last year, Microsoft announced the deprecation for Android device administration with Intune. Poly Voice Software will include the replacement device administration service starting with 2 software releases:

• PVOS 8.1.7, for use on Android 9 – Summer of 2024
• PVOS 9.0.1, for use on Android 12 – Fall of 2024

Note: The above dates are estimates and subject to change.

Zoom Phone Certification​

Poly is committed to supporting the native Zoom experience and has submitted the Poly CCX and Trio C60 for renewal under the Zoom Device Certification Program with the intention to certify on Android 12.

For more details on the Zoom Device Certification status and certification dates, refer to Zoom Phone Certified Hardware.

Near Real-Time Device Monitoring​

As Hybrid Work & Return to Office trends continue to evolve, so do the collaboration patterns. Therefore, it has become more important than ever to ensure that meeting room devices are up & running always. If a device disconnects from the Poly Lens cloud, it likely means the device has stopped working and is no longer connected to the outside network. As an IT admin, when this happens, especially if it is a VIP room, you’d want to know immediately so that you can take corrective action proactively without waiting for the user to create a support ticket. The deviceStream API does that and more.

The DeviceStream Subscription API​

The newly launched deviceStream API is a scalable GraphQL Subscription API that enables real-time monitoring of various key attributes of Poly devices and provides an update when their values change. Most notably this includes the connection status between Poly devices and the Poly Lens cloud. You can use this API to build custom monitoring and alerting based on device connectedness, understand when a device's software has been updated, and much more.

Supported Key Attributes​

connected: Connection status between Poly device and Poly Lens cloud.
tenantId: The Poly Lens account identifier of the device.
siteId: Unique identifier of the site.
roomId: Unique identifier of the room.
modelId: The unique model name or number of the device.
productId: Product identifier of the device.
id: Unique identifier of the device.
name: The official name of a product without a manufacturer name, e.g. Studio P15.
externalIp: External IP address of the device.
macAddress: Mac address of the device.
hardwareRevision: The revision number of the device's hardware.
softwareVersion: Product software version.
softwareBuild: Unique identifier of the build of the device software. This helps differentiate different builds within the same version.

Important Note: The API stream is engineered to track state changes across multiple devices simultaneously. To prevent exceeding rate limits, it's strongly recommended to use a single API stream to monitor multiple devices. This can be achieved by listing device IDs separated by commas within an array. For details refer to example queries here.

Accessing the deviceStream API​

You can access the deviceStream API at the Poly Lens GraphQL Playground. To use this API in your application, you can create credentials in Poly Lens. See How to Get Started.

Here’s the scoop: We’ve added a new widget to our dashboard lineup to view your Room usage all in one place.

With the new Room Utilization vs. Occupancy bubble chart, you can visualize room utilization, size, and occupancy in a single view. Each bubble represents a single room, with its size proportional to its capacity and its position reflecting its utilization and occupancy. Utilization is the number of hours a day that room is used, and occupancy is the number of people in the room against its capacity.

You can quickly identify rooms that are over-utilized, under-utilized, consistently empty, or reaching maximum capacity (and any combination of the above!). This allows you to reallocate resources or repurpose spaces as needed. Ready to maximize the efficiency of your rooms? The bubble chart is now available in the dashboard. Take a look!

P.S. Don’t forget to add capacity to your rooms in a room’s settings if you haven’t already to take advantage of this new feature.

People crave authentic connections, whether through eye contact, body language, or engaging conversations. As the hybrid work landscape continues to evolve, it is crucial to integrate technology that keeps people at the forefront of virtual meetings. Our goal is to make hybrid work feel as effortless as possible.

Imagine the convenience of having your headset seamlessly connect to your PC without the hassle of adapters or manual setting adjustments as you start your Zoom meeting. Last fall at HP Imagine, we announced our Bluetooth® direct technology, a user-friendly pairing experience for Poly Voyager headsets and select HP notebooks. This week at Enterprise Connect, we are excited to introduce our Bluetooth® direct technology for Zoom to simplify connectivity for virtual meetings in Zoom.

HP | Poly offers the world's first Bluetooth® headsets that deliver call control for Zoom without a dongleⁱ

We want to make hybrid work easier for employees. With the Poly Lens Desktop App pre-installed on select HP laptops, a Poly Voyager headset can be automatically detected for a secure pairing experience with a single click — a notification with a picture of the headset model will appear for confirmation. Users have complete control over their calls and meeting experience from their paired Poly Voyager headset or Zoom. They can set preferences, accept calls, use voice prompts, and access mute and volume controls, while a simple click keeps the software current. Users can manage their hybrid work transitions without worrying about leaving a dongle or USB adapter behind or in their PC ports.

We want to make hybrid work easier for IT. The Poly Lens Admin portal empowers IT teams with centralized software control across mobile and remote workforces — with or without Bluetooth dongles. IT teams can efficiently manage fleets of devices with policy-based provisioning, actively monitor device health to improve operations, and collect usage trends to adjust device settings where necessary.

Bluetooth® direct technology for Zoom is expected to be available in July 2024 through an update to the Poly Lens Desktop App to enhance the legendary Poly audio experience. It will be available on select Poly Voyager headsets, such as the Voyager Free 60 UC Series and the Voyager Surround UC Series.

Optimizing Collaboration with Zoom-Certified Devices
HP and Poly continue to expand their portfolio of Zoom-certified solutions. The HP EliteBook 840 and 845 G11 Notebook PCs are now certified in Zoom’s premium laptop category. Equipped with HP Wolf Securityⁱⁱ and AI-based performance optimizationⁱⁱⁱ, users can enjoy an exceptional Zoom experience with strong security regardless of where work gets done.

"Zoom is committed to fostering innovation and improving the overall collaboration experience, and the introduction of HP | Poly’s Bluetooth direct technology for Zoom signifies an important step towards seamless connectivity for hybrid workers,” said Smita Hashim, Chief Product Officer, Zoom. Our growing portfolio of native experiences and Zoom-certified solutions with HP | Poly is a testament to this dedication, which will enable teams to do their best work.”

ⁱ Based on HP's internal analysis of Windows Notebooks as of March 25, 2024.
ⁱⁱ HP Wolf Security for Business requires Windows 10 or 11 Pro and higher, includes various HP security features and is available on HP Pro, Elite, RPOS and Workstation products. See product details for included security features.
ⁱⁱⁱ Features and software that require a NPU may require may require software purchase, subscription or enablement by a software or platform provider, and third party software may have specific configuration or compatibility requirements. Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors.

In today's world, meetings are considered indispensable. They play a pivotal role in fostering collaboration, sparking brainstorming sessions, and guiding decision-making processes that shape project and strategy directions. Yet, it's evident that not all meetings are effective. While intended to be drivers of efficiency and innovation, many unfortunately veer off course, resulting in inefficiency and a lack of productivity. Often, the root causes of these shortcomings are elusive, leaving us with limited data to diagnose and understand the underlying issues.

In response to this challenge, we're thrilled to announce a new integration with Microsoft Office 365 Calendars as part of our latest Premium offering on Poly Lens. This new integration streamlines the activation of Meeting Behavior Insights within Poly Lens. The best part? These meeting behavior insights are supported on all major meeting platforms.

Uncover Insights that can Drive Results​

Let's explore a pair of examples showcasing the insights offered by this integration.

Meetings that Started Late

Late-starting meetings often result in wasted time and can disrupt the flow of the workday. This could signal a room technology issue, a training opportunity, or an underlying organizational behavior like back-to-back meeting schedules. By analyzing the reasons behind delayed starts, you can implement solutions that can help correct the issue.

Rooms Scheduled, but Empty

When meeting rooms are booked, but go unused, it reflects a misallocation of resources. Tracking this behavior can help you understand why meetings are being scheduled but not held. It could indicate a need for better calendar management, better scheduling practices, or maybe there is something wrong with the room. Addressing this issue ensures that valuable space and resources are utilized effectively.

Full list of Supported Meeting Behavior Insights

• Meetings that ran long: Meetings that ended after the scheduled time
• Meetings that started late: Meetings that started after the scheduled time
• Meetings that were unscheduled: Meetings that occurred in the room without being scheduled
• Rooms scheduled, but empty: Scheduled meetings that were unattended
• Rooms scheduled in a series, but empty: Repeating scheduled meetings that were unattended

Simplified Path to Meeting Behavior Insights

You can enjoy these new Meeting Behavior Insights in two sections within Poly Lens.

Priority Insights: A curtate newsfeed of your most notable insights. Find the latest insights at Insights > Priority > Rooms.
More details at Poly Lens Help - Priority Insights.

Analysis: Self-guided dashboard that allows you to filter through the data to conduct in-depth analysis on your workspace. Explore the new Meeting Behavior analytics at Manage > Rooms > (Select Room) > Analysis.
More details at Poly Lens Help - Analysis

Getting Started​

1. Enabling the Office 365 Calendar Integration
   To enable the integration, to go the Admin menu > Integrations, select Office 365 Calendar. Allow Access and Authenticate to your Office 365 tenant.

   Once Poly Lens has been granted access, we built in a bunch of neat tools to make linking your Calendars to Rooms in Poly Lens very easy.
   More details at Poly Lens Help - Office 365 Calendar Overview.

2. Linking Calendar to Poly Lens Rooms
   To enjoy the new benefits of this integration, it is important to Link your Calendars to your Poly Lens Rooms. To link your Poly Lens Rooms, Go to Manage > Rooms, select Add Calendar, and link your Room calendar in Room Settings. Once linked via the dropdown or typing in, the calendar will begin Syncing and then show Integrated once all calendar details are linked. Note: Office 365 Calendar needs to be enabled before linking calendars to Poly Lens Rooms.
   More details at Poly Lens Help - Office 365 Calendar Room Setup.

3. Monitoring Integration Status
   Once you have linked your Calendars to your Poly Lens Room, we made it easy to monitor the health and status of the integration. You can view the health status of each Room calendar directly from Room Status or the Room List in Poly Lens. This near real-time visibility ensures that meeting spaces are successfully linked, and the integration is healthy. And if they are not healthy, you can understand what actions you need to take to get them healthy again.

   To monitor Calendar Integration, display the list of Rooms (Manage > Rooms) and use the pencil icon to display the Calendar column.
   More details at Poly Lens Help - Office 365 Calendar Details.

Embrace the Future of Meeting Insights​

Upgrade and access all your Poly Lens Premium Lens Features today and empower your organization with the tools needed to drive productivity, enhance collaboration, and embrace the future of meeting insights. Your journey to seamless Meeting Behavior Insights using Microsoft Office 365 Calendar starts today – let us know what you think by clicking on Feedback in Poly Lens.

Today, we are excited to introduce an innovative capability that allows seamless automatic tracking of any device's public or private IP subnet within a specified range to a designated site. Our enhanced Device Association feature has been crafted to empower IT administrators, providing them with a robust tools to fortify network security and streamline overall management processes. This resourceful feature holds significant value for individuals tasked with monitoring and device management for sites falling within specified IP ranges.

To leverage this feature effectively, consider the following recommendations:

• Define IP Range Parameters: Clearly define the IP range you want to monitor. Tailor the settings to match your organization's network structure, security protocols, and configured Site Policies for Device Families and/or Device Models.
• Any new Sites created in Lens and when accessing the Device Association setting will automatically Default to the new Recommended option to Automatically update devices site association. Devices will automatically match the subnet rule(s) when the device changes it's IP Address and falls into the configured subnet rule.
• The behavior of device site associations for existing Accounts and Sites will remain unchanged and will stay enabled as Update device site association only for newly onboarded and unassigned devices.

To Get Started Go to Manage > Sites > Add New or Select a Site > Settings > Device Association.
For more information search for Device Site Association in Poly Lens Help.

Poly Lens has continually added flexibility to how you can easily manage device software updates at scale. We are excited to announce that as part of our Lens Desktop 1.3.0 release for Windows, we have added support for another device software update policy option as well as a new Lens Desktop version policy. We also have added Acoustic events data collection from supported headsets as part of a Poly + Enterprise License.

Policy Enhancements - Device Software Update and Lens Desktop Version​

We have added a new way for you to have confidence a device software or Lens Desktop version gets implemented for your device end users. This option allows you to send the end user three notices to update to the version you have set in the policy, however if the end user chooses not to update during the three notices Lens will move forward to implement the update after end user PC restart.

Benefits to End User: Gives notice to the end user that an update within Lens Desktop is required and gives them the flexibility to postpone the update three times before the update happens.

Benefits to IT Admin: Gives their end users flexibility on choosing their preferred update timing and also gives the assurance the update will be automatically implemented after the third notice and PC restart.

Acoustic Event Insights & Report​

Lens has added a Lens Desktop setting policy to enable the collection of headset acoustic events since these are turned off by default with select Poly devices. Once data collection is turned on all acoustic events will show in an Acoustic Events report to show any acoustic events that occurred during conversations using select Poly products.

For more information on Lens policy and reporting options, search for Policy Settings and Reports in Poly Lens Help.

Welcome to a new era of seamless device management and monitoring within Lens Rooms, where Poly Devices and Lens are set to redefine your Room management experience. Our latest enhancements bring forth a series of improvements designed to empower you in efficiently navigating and monitoring Rooms. To start, the Side Navigation of your Room Overview will expose your Room detail settings by offering a more user-friendly interface. In addition, we've introduced comprehensive device status enhancements that provide real-time updates on the online, offline status of your devices. Along with getting contextual information if that Room is in a Meeting or Idle. Now, at a glance, you can effortlessly determine the operational state of each device in your Room. Furthermore, our approach extends to the introduction of an updated Device Inventory table, offering a centralized hub to monitor and manage all devices within the Room efficiently. Join us on this journey as we uncover the details of these enhancements, unlocking a new level of control and visibility for your Poly Devices in Lens Rooms.

To get started, go to Manage > Rooms > Add New or Select a Room.
For more information see Poly Lens Help - Manage Rooms.

Side Navigation​

We've improved Room identification by exposing important details on the Room Overview side navigation. The following Room details that are set or added/updated by a Lens administrator are exposed in Room Overview:

1. Room Name
2. Site and Floor
3. Capacity
4. Room Size: None/Focus/Huddle/Small/Medium/Large

Device Status Enhancements: Minimized and Expanded views on Device Online/Offline and Meeting Status.

Minimized View: Get immediate visibility to Devices that are online or offline and Meeting status for the Room. Use the Arrow Icon to expand Device and Meeting status information.

Device Status Expanded View: Descriptions on Devices that are Online and 1 or more devices that are Offline.

Click State on Offline Devices: Provides Device Name information on Device Model(s) that are Offline.

Meeting Status Expanded:

The Device Inventory Table: Includes the following information on the devices associated to a Room. This table can also be minimized with the Arrow Icon.

1. The Device Inventory will list the total number (#) of devices in the Room on the Title.
2. Search Table option to isolate to a single Device.
3. Use the Pencil icon to Expose or Hide device details based on Admin preference.
4. Device Details Include:

   • Date Added

   • Date Last Seen

   • Device Model

   • Device Name

   • Last Provisioning Sync

   • MAC Address

   • Private IP

   • Provider

   • Serial Number

   • Software Version

   • Status (Online/Offline)
      

Poly Lens GraphQL Subscriptions​

At Poly, we’re committed to providing you with all the tools and flexibility you need to create the best collaboration experience for your users and your unique use cases. Our portfolio of nearly 100 officially supported Poly Lens APIs already caters to several use cases such as Inventory Reporting & Management, Device & Room Insights, and Device Controls.

And today, we’re excited to add another dimension to our API portfolio. Announcing, the Poly Lens GraphQL Subscriptions! GraphQL Subscriptions enable you to create web-socket based listeners on fields of your interest so that you get an alert as soon as the value of the field changes. This opens a plethora of new use cases that you can now address using Poly Lens APIs. The first API utilizing the new GraphQL subscription stream focuses on People Counting.

peopleCountStream Subscription API​

The peopleCountStream subscription is a simple, yet powerful and versatile API that enables you to monitor room occupancy in near real-time. It creates a web-socket based listener on people count data sent by Poly devices. As soon as people count changes, the API notifies the API user of the change and provides an updated people count for a particular meeting room.

This simple, yet powerful API is designed to show live room occupancy. When combined with custom applications, a variety of different use cases could be enabled, including:

• Releasing meeting rooms from ghost meetings without waiting for meeting end time
• Adjusting HVAC and lighting as soon as a room is occupied or vacated
• Visualizing live room occupancy to create a near real-time view of your meeting rooms

How to Access the peopleCountStream API​

You can access the peopleCountStream API at the Poly Lens GraphQL Playground. To use this API in your application, you can create credentials in Poly Lens. See How to Get Started.

peopleCountStream API in action on the Poly Lens GraphQL Playground

Note: The peopleCountStream API is available to Poly+ Enterprise customers and currently supports Poly Studio X30, Studio X50, and Studio X52.