Polycom releases new firmware 3.0 for SoundPoint IP Phones, LDAP Support!

Polycom today released a new firmware revision for their popular SoundPoint series IP Telephones. There are quite a few changes noted in the release notes. BEFORE GOING INTO DETAIL ON THE NEW FEATURES, LET ME JUST MENTION THAT POLYCOM MENTIONS THE NECESSITY OF OBTAINING A “FEATURE LICENSE’ TO ENABLE MOST OF THESE BELLS AND WHISTLES….NO WORD ON THE COST TO OBTAIN THE FEATURE LICENSE, BUT WE ARE LOOKING INTO IT. FEATURE LICENSING IS A NEW THING FOR POLYCOM (OLD HAT FOR CISCO) Amongst these enhancements are:

VQMonCall Quality Monitoring Support – Specifically designed for integration into VoIP endpoints such as VoIP gateways, IP phones, ONU’s, residential gateways, mobile handsets, traditional TDM gateways and hybrid IP/TDM systems, VQmon/EP monitors voice calls and produces call quality estimates that can be reported as MOS scores and R factors through the media path using RTCP XR (RFC 3611), end of call signaling or SNMP. VQmon/EP is small (6-30kbytes) and highly efficient.

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) Support – LDAP is a feature that many businesses buy into, and support for LDAP within the Asterisk marketplace has been pretty weak to date. This could certainly help win deals for VARs selling Asterisk into larger customers.

Local Call Recording on the IP650 – This is pretty sweet…the IP650 has an onboard USB port, and apparently with this new firmware release, you can now plug in a USB Flash Media device and perform local call recording on the phone at the touch of a button.

4-Way Local Conference Calling and Conference Management Feature Enhancements

Jabra JX10 Hookswitch support

uaCSTA Support for Click to Dial Feature – (User Agent Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications) – CSTA is a ECMA, ETSI and ISO/IEC Standard with an exhaustive feature set and a comprehensive call model. CSTA supports, with the same call model, Voice and Non-Voice interactions (Email, Chat, IM and many more) and complements SIP protocol, enabling application developers to provide advanced features. This suite is a complete toolbox for developing a wide range of enterprise grade CSTA applications taking advantage of Internet technologies such as XML, SIP and Speech Recognition and Processing. CSTA supports a wide range of application scenarios, from basic 1st Party Call Control to advanced 3rd Party Call Control with the same standardised model. CSTA lets application developers to create advanced communication platform features without burdening them with underlying protocol specifications.

Pretty cool stuff….this seems to be one of the more significant firmware feature released from Polycom in some time.