Keep in mind that in the future some of these management tasks may become even easier as with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of some portions of Event Zero’s UC Commander platform as that could materialize into more direct control of Polycom UCS configuration parameters inside of the Office 365 administration portals. This article addresses these online-only tenants with guidance on how to manage IP phone firmware without using any additional management solutions. But what about the growing number of environments where none of those components exist and literally everything outside of the clients and end-user devices are simply leveraging the Office 365 cloud platform? While separate provisioning servers can still be utilized with the various 3PIP devices, the guidance across all of the previous articles is focused on traditional on-premises deployments of Lync and Skype for Business server platforms. These same concepts still generally apply when using the devices with Skype for Business Online but the configuration and management is slightly different. In the past dealing with device updates has been covered in several articles for the different device families and models.
As outlined in this previous article a wide array of Polycom phones are now supported directly with Skype for Business Online in Office 365.
