What's New

Enabled by Lens Integrations, Poly | HP Meeting Room Devices Become an Integral Part of Smart Buildings​

The Partnership with Neowit​

When you think of a Device Management Platform, you likely associate it with updating software, remotely monitoring devices, or deploying new configurations. Seldom, if ever, would you think about building management. However, the two are more closely related than you might think. By analyzing data from devices across the building, one can derive highly useful insights about space and resource utilization in the building. That is why we have partnered with Neowit, a fast-growing Smart Building Management start-up, that creates a single aggregated view of all devices in a building. All made possible by the Lens API.

What are Smart Buildings?​

Smart Buildings communicate with internal systems, devices, and sensors such as HVAC, lighting, alarms, cameras, etc. to self-regulate building operations, minimize environmental impact, while making it safer and more comfortable for occupants.

Powered by Internet of Things (IoT) and Power over Ethernet (PoE) technologies and others, smart buildings are poised to play an ever-increasing role in helping businesses manage the return to office and achieve sustainability compliance goals.

Some interesting examples of what Smart Buildings can do:

• Use people counting sensors to automatically turn off lighting, turn off air-conditioning, and trigger an autonomous disinfection process as soon as meeting rooms are vacated.
• Turn on the building tenant’s allocated space lighting systems as soon as tenant swipes their access card at building entrance.
• Increase ventilation as occupancy increases.

The Poly | HP and Neowit Advantage​

While Smart Buildings hold a lot of promise, without a single cohesive view of the data from the innumerable devices and sensors in a building, it is difficult for businesses to optimize space utilization, reduce carbon footprint and overall make smarter business decisions.

Further, people-counting and air quality sensors can cost anywhere from $1000 to $3000 USD. Poly | HP Studio X Series devices come with sensors built-in, which directly translates to cost savings.

That’s why Poly | HP has partnered with Neowit – a leader in Smart Building technology. Neowit’s flagship product (the Neowit Platform), is a modern, scalable IoT facility management and workplace portal. This platform provides comprehensive visibility into your office space and assets, by aggregating data from various IoT sensors and devices into a single pane of glass.

Lens Integrations – Poly Lens Management & Insights API​

The publicly available Poly Lens Management and Insight API supports all features in the Poly Lens admin portal. You can easily create API credentials right in Lens in Accounts > Integrations. Using these credentials, you can create an access token that in turn can be used to grant access of your Poly Lens tenant to third-party platforms such as Neowit.

Smart Buildings are the Future​

With environmental impact, financial and operational considerations, Smart Buildings are clearly an area of global interest. Making the best use of real estate through insights and analytics, provided by partnerships such as the one between Poly | HP and Neowit, which will undoubtedly deliver a better bottom line for business. Here’s a quick intro video about Neowit.

The Poly Lens Device Actions page has been updated with a new and improved design that speeds response time to offline systems, delivers better visibility into device upgrades, and ensures site assignments are optimized.

One of the key changes to the Device Actions page is the new layout. Instead of a single feed of information, the page is now divided into multiple columns and cards for each action, including Offline Devices, Updates Available, and Unassigned Sites. The same filter options are available, but the filter capability is now at the top of the Device Actions page. This allows for a clear snapshot of suggested actions, with simple user interaction.

For each Action card, you'll see the number of device models that need attention. If more than one device model needs attention, you can click on the Action card to see a full list of devices. If you need to filter Device Actions by Site or Device Model, you can do so via the dropdown menus at the top of the page. Included with Poly+ and Poly+ Enterprise, you can trigger automated notifications via email, Microsoft Teams or ServiceNow by clicking the Set Custom Notifications button in the top right corner of the page.

To access the updated Device Actions page, simply click on the Actions card on the Poly Lens homepage or select Actions in the Manage menu (Manage > Actions). For more details visit Poly Lens Help.

Access at-a-glance views on call usage, device performance, room utilization, and more. The Dashboard displays data across your entire inventory, enabling you to visualize key digestible metrics in a single screen. New features include:

• Call Usage: Compare utilization between call providers for visibility into adoption trends
• Rooms Summary: Detect room devices with the most intermittent connectivity issues to better manage inventory health
• Workplace Trends: Monitor average meeting sizes by day of the week for insight into space optimization and productivity

Take a look at the Dashboard from the Insights Menu (Insights > Dashboard), and don’t forget to leave us a note about what you would like to see next.

We have now officially opened the Lens Management and Insights API to our developer community. The guiding principle of the new Lens Management and Insights API is to provide our developer community opportunities to innovate and create in ways that continue to build new experiences, making collaboration easier for everyone by leveraging our platforms. Whether you are an independent developer, enterprise developer, solution provider, or system integrator, you have the opportunity to take advantage of the intelligent insights and management capabilities offered on the Poly Lens platform to optimize your workflows, build custom applications, or extract the data from Lens in a way that works for your organization.

Built using GraphQL, the Lens Management and Insight API supports all the features you see in the Poly Lens Portal. Visit our new API Marketplace to get support, share ideas, and see a few examples of common use cases such as reporting device inventory, controlling device state, and platform management. There you will also be able to access the built-in API playground to learn, understand, and experiment with each API. Once you are ready to start building, you can easily create API credentials right in Lens. Use these credentials to get an access token that can be used to grant access to a particular tenant.

Ready to start building a custom application using the Lens APIs? Visit our API Guide to get started. We can’t wait to see what you create.

Poly Lens Desktop now supports a Local Mode deployment in addition to Lens Cloud Mode. This is a temporary solution that serves our customers who need a basic device management end user tool while completing their company approval processes for the full featured Lens Cloud platform. This solution allows for some customization of Lens Desktop and requires deploying a JSON file along with the Lens Desktop app. This option is available for Lens Desktop 1.1.6 version or higher. All Poly Lens supported USB and Bluetooth devices are supported.

The Lens Desktop features that can be customized include:

• Changing Lens Desktop from Cloud to Local mode
• Allowing for auto acceptance to bypass the Lens End User License Agreement screen
• Supporting firmware updates based on files stored in a designated customer folder
• Allowing for either all or no Device settings to be shown in the app
• Customizable time frame for device end user firmware update app notifications

For detailed instructions on how to deploy in this mode, please reach out to your Poly Sales team.

Poly Lens is excited to announce support for Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway to Enable Lens Assisted Provisioning to support admin control over additional Poly Features. This feature enables a cloud-to-cloud integration between Poly Lens and Microsoft Teams Admin Center, allowing administrators additional control and customization of devices registering to the Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway Service. This allows IT admins to also manage software and device health status, device details and settings, custom/dynamic configuration profiles, softkey management, and paging. Lastly, the integration is seamless in retrieving the settings configured to Teams SIP Gateway which is also reflected in Lens for IT Management.

Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway was launched for customers that want to extend their investment in Polycom VVX / Trio / On-premise Skype phones. Although not immediate, Teams SIP Gateway is intended to replace Teams 3PIP Gateway. Start your migration with Poly Lens today and take advantage of onboarding devices using the built-in Lens Provisioning service and enabling the Policy feature (Device Model, Device Group, Site) to accelerate migrations with significantly less effort to deploy and manage Teams-enabled endpoints in Poly Lens.

For additional information and step-by-step instructions visit: Poly Lens Policy - Microsoft Teams.

Huge thank you for participating in the Poly Lens Mobile app beta. Your testing and feedback have been key in making the app better. As of today, the beta test is now closed.

Please watch this space for updates and links to download the Poly Lens Mobile app soon.

We are looking for people who want to take part in shaping the latest software from the Poly Lens team by test-driving pre-releases of the new Poly Lens Mobile app and letting us know what you think.

The Poly Lens Mobile app allows you to manage the Poly Bluetooth headsets and personal speakerphones to help you get the most out of your Poly devices.

The Poly Lens Mobile allows you to:

• Keep your device up to date with the latest software
• Customize your device settings to meet your work style
• Access helpful support
• Keep track of your device with the Find My Device feature
• Available for both iOS and Android

The devices supported in this beta include Poly Voyager 4200, Voyager 4300, Voyager 5200, Voyager 6200, Voyager 8200, Voyager Focus, Voyager Focus 2, Poly Sync 20, and Sync 40.

To get started, you must be a member of the Poly Beta Test Community to be a tester and reside in the United States.

If you are new to the Poly Beta Community, you will be prompted to fill out My Profile and Devices.

Once you complete the registration, you will receive an email with instructions on how to access the Beta app within 48 hours. Register now at https://polycom.centercode.com/key/PolyLensMobile.

You asked. We implemented. Cut through the data noise with fine-grain controls to specify date ranges, and explore in-depth analytics with specific site, room, and device reports. Dig into your workspace and inventory health, usage, and behavior more quickly and easily than ever before.

These new reports and capabilities in Poly Lens help provide valuable perspectives that shed insight into the many reasons behind your inventory's performance. See an offline device? Now you can click into that device to see for how long, how often, and at what intervals it has been offline so you can determine the best course of action for your organization to get that device online and ensure everyone is up and running.

Need to make informed decisions about room utilization? The new site and room level reports give you the control to see exactly how many people are using which space and when. Filter to a specific year, quarter, month, week, or even day to monitor how your employees are returning to the office or when occupancy is at its peak. Select an entire site, or even select just one room to be well-informed of your workspace usage. These new reports give you the data you need, when you need it, allowing you to see patterns of utilization and act on them.

Here is a Preview:

Site and Room reports can be found under Manage > Sites > Site Name > Analysis, or Manage > Rooms > Room Name > Analysis. Device level reports are also accessible under Analysis by clicking on the Device name within your Inventory or within each Room.

For more details on Poly Lens Insights, check out our Insights Categories on the Poly Lens Help. We are listening to your feedback and are making changes so we can meet your needs in the best way possible. So, keep them coming!

All PDMS-E (Device Management Service For Enterprise) users can now easily migrate their data over to Poly Lens! This migration tool helps PDMS-E users take their current Policies and Device Assignment data and import it to their new Poly Lens account.

To get started, users must first login to their existing PDMS-E tenant and select the Export for Poly Lens button. A local download of a zipped file will be executed.

Once the zipped file has been downloaded, see the Import and Migrate section in Poly Lens and perform the import process.

Then you will need to point the devices from PDMS-E to Poly Lens. To perform this, please see Device Migration for detailed information. This will ensure your deployed devices will call home to Poly Lens instead of PDMS-E.

And you’re done! Now you can use all the great features in Poly Lens to remotely manage, monitoring and troubleshoot your devices from a single pane of glass in a new modern platform.

A more detailed process to migrate the devices is also outlined in our Poly Lens Help.