What's New

Maintaining a consistent device experience across an organization is essential when curating a good meeting experience for everyone, but this doesn’t have to be a full-time job. Today, Poly Lens is excited to announce policy-based support for remote software update management for headsets, personal speakerphones, and webcams that are connected to the Poly Lens Desktop app. Now you can determine the exact device software version your organization has access to. Whether you want to test the latest releases before deploying to your whole organization or if you want to give your teams immediate access to the latest releases, the choice is yours. Poly Lens has the tools to make the job easy.

To get started: Go to Manage > Policies > Device Model and/or Site. Select the USB device from the Device Model list. Once a software update policy is created, remote device users will be prompted to update their device during the next Poly Lens Desktop polling event.

Policy management is supported on all the same devices that Poly Lens Desktop supports. See the full list of supported Poly USB devices at Poly Lens Supported Devices. Note: This feature requires Poly Lens Desktop V1.1.12+.

For more details visit: Poly Lens Help.

Keeping devices up, running, and ready for action is critical and when those devices are in trouble, you want to be alerted as quickly as possible. Today, as part of the Poly+ service, the Notification Center has been expanded to include a new integration to ServiceNow. The notifications sent from Poly Lens into ServiceNow allows you to get critical automated device alerts, providing you with the insights you need to take action when they matter most. Once configured, device alerts from the Poly Lens Notification Center are delivered right to your ServiceNow instance and include visibility to when devices go offline and when devices have software updates available.

To get started, Poly+ users:

1. Go to Account menu > Manage Accounts.
2. Select an Account from the list.
3. Select Notifications from the side tabs.
4. Select ServiceNow.

For more information and configuration details on ServiceNow Notification Setup see Poly Lens Help.

Gaining insights into the utilization of workspaces is increasingly vital to planning and executing the return to the office. That is why we are excited to open up the Room Insights within Poly Lens as a public beta. Intended to provide in-office and remote IT managers with much-needed visibility into how meeting rooms are being used, these Room Insights are designed to track several key metrics critical to understanding workplace optimization. With these Room Insights, Poly Lens can track seven key parameters including, average meeting headcount, late meeting start times, meetings that run over the scheduled time, and even meetings that happen when none were scheduled.

Understanding meeting attendance is just one example of how these Room Insights might help you make informed decisions about room utilization. Imagine when 5-person meetings keep happening in a large conference room and prevent a bigger group from using the space. This is not the best use of the space, but Poly Lens can help highlight these areas for you and allow you make informed decisions based on how people are using the space when we return to the office.

To Get started go to Insights > Priority or Categories > Rooms tab.

For more information on Room Insights see Poly Lens Help - Room Insights.

We’re excited to open these new Room Insights for beta testing and look forward to your feedback on how these new tools are empowering you to make informed and important decisions. The beta is open now to any Poly customer with a Poly Lens account and a supported device. Let us know how these Room Insights are helping you take action to make the best use of your devices and workspaces.

Poly Lens Desktop app is essential in allowing you to centrally manage, monitor, and maintain your organization's fleet of USB-connected devices, but this is only possible if Poly Lens desktop app is deployed successfully. Now, deploying the Poly Lens Desktop app, just got a whole lot easier. Using a new integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Poly Lens will automatically onboard users and their connected devices based on the email domain they used in Poly Lens Desktop app. Your team will be automatically associated with the correct account in Poly Lens, regardless of how people in your organization obtained their Poly Lens Desktop app. This includes whether the app was sent out over Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, formerly System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), emailed out using the tools in Poly Lens, or directly downloaded from Poly.com, the choice is yours.

To get started:

1. Go to Account menu > Manage Accounts.
2. Select an Account from the list.
3. Select Integrations from the side tabs.
4. Select Allow Access.
5. Select Apply.

For more details, visit: Poly Lens Help.

Professional-grade headsets, personal speakerphones, and webcams are a modern office must-have. So keeping them in tip-top shape is essential, and to do so, you must be able to manage them remotely. That’s where adding a software solution that monitors, manages, and maintains these types of devices comes in. Today, Poly Lens celebrates another huge milestone by adding Policy management support for these types of devices. The same, recently redefined Policy management tool that (add) is used to manage settings for group room video device, conference phones, and personal desk phones, has been extended to also support settings management on headsets, personal speakerphones, and webcams, allowing you to remotely manage configurations for devices that are associated through Poly Lens Desktop.

To get started: Go to Manage > Policies > Device Model. Select USB device model from the Device Model list. For full instructions, see Poly Lens Help.
Policy management is supported on all the same devices that Poly Lens Desktop supports. See the full list at Poly Lens Supported Devices.

The Poly Lens team has been quietly working hard to release dozens of customer-focused solutions over the last few months with one goal in mind: to help IT admins manage their devices from a single pane of glass. The following summary of features in Poly Lens is itemized in the following categories: Deployment, Change Management, Inventory Monitoring, and Insights. Controlling your entire voice, video, and headset estate just got a whole lot easier.

Deployment​

These updates help onboard devices, activate licenses if using Poly+, and import device policies for easy provisioning.

Device Support​

Over the past few months, the following devices have been added to the long list of devices that Poly Lens supports. Poly Lens now supports, Studio USB, Studio E70, Studio X70, Edge B Series, the latest EncorePro Series, and the Blackwire, Voyager, Sync, and the Savi families.

For a detailed list, visit the Supported Devices page.

Poly+ Licensing Activation​

We have redesigned the Poly+ Licensing experience that enables IT admins to cover the activation and assigning of Poly+ licenses in Poly Lens. Poly+ now supports most Poly devices, making it easy for the customer to opt for premium services.

Manage Poly+ Licenses in Poly Lens by going to Manage > Licensing > Poly+.

Detailed steps can be found at Activate Poly+ Licenses.

Policy Import and Staging​

Now you can import device configurations using a simple .csv file. This allows you quickly change device configurations or even stage device configurations, which helps get devices ready to use faster. Start by going to Manage > Policies > Device Model > Import Settings. Note: This applies to device-level policies only.

Detailed steps can be found at Import Settings.

Change Management​

The following updates allow you to enact Policies at the Device Group and Site level, access USB Device settings in real-time, and access the health of secondary devices connected to primary device endpoints.

Group and Site-based Device Policies are available now!​

Policies were introduced into Poly Lens earlier this year, but this feature now includes a completely redesigned workflow to manage Policies. This feature also includes the ability to add custom-defined groups of devices as well. Together, this gives you the ability to create a consistent device experience at scale across both sites and custom-defined groups of devices.

Access Group and Site Device Policies in Poly Lens by going to Manage > Policies > Site and/or Device Group.

Detailed steps can be found at Policy by Site and Device Group Details.

1-1 Centralized USB Device Controls​

Settings for Personal Devices, like headsets and USB video devices, can now be controlled, in real-time, from the Poly Lens portal once that device is registered to Poly Lens using the Poly Lens Desktop app. This is especially helpful when remotely troubleshooting camera settings or mute alert behaviors. To control a device, navigate to that device settings by going to Manage > Inventory > < Device Name > > Settings.

Secondary Device Support​

You can now inventory and monitor the health of connected peripherals, including room controllers and microphones. The management of these peripherals works alongside a managed video device in Poly Lens. Currently, the following are supported as connected peripherals in Poly Lens: Microphones, Cameras, Room Controllers, Speakers, Remote Controls, and connected IP Devices, like a Trio, or a Studio X Series device. A connected peripheral will automatically show up in Poly Lens once connected to a primary device that has been registered to Poly Lens.

For more information, see Connected Devices.

Inventory Monitoring​

These features are pivotal to troubleshooting when things go wrong, managing remote user devices and getting critical device alerts when they matter most.

Health and Status Reporting​

For easier troubleshooting, supported devices in Poly Lens report detail device information, including SIP and H.323 Service Information and Network Health Information. This is found by selecting Manage > Inventory > < Device Name > > Troubleshooting > Device Information.

Notification Center: Now with Device Offline Alert and Microsoft Teams Integration​

As part of the Poly+ service, the Notification Center has been expanded to include a new alert for Offline Devices with a new integration to Microsoft Teams. Critical device alerts are now delivered right to a Microsoft Teams channel, enabling quick visibility around which devices are offline, software update available, or license expiring. To get started, you can enable Device Alerts in two ways:

• Account menu > Manage Accounts > select an Account > Notifications
• Account menu > your user name > Notifications

For more information see, Notification Integrations.

Troubleshooting and Logging​

When you receive a report of call quality issues, there are numerous possibilities to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve the issue of concern. Poly Lens now provides centralized remote access to device logging and network packet capture (.pcap). You can use the packet captures for network troubleshooting and analysis in third-party network protocol analyzer applications.

Device Logs: Select Manage > Inventory > < Device Name > > Troubleshooting > Diagnostics
For more information see Supported Devices for Diagnostics and Diagnostics.

Packet Capture: Select Manage > Inventory > < Device Name > > Troubleshooting > Packet Capture
For more information see Supported Devices for Packet Capture and Packet Capture.

Insights​

These features spotlight the health and efficiency of your spaces and devices by providing intelligent and actionable Insights.

Insight Data Visualizations​

Insights in Poly Lens have been overhauled to include a new way to visualize your data. Time-based charts help you gain deeper insights into device usage and adoption. As a reminder, the following Insights are curated using a machine learning based insights feed.

• Devices Offline: Percentage of devices that are not connected to the network
• Devices in Use: Percentage of devices with at least one call a week
• Devices Not in Use: Percentage of online devices with no calls for more than one week
• Out-of-Service Devices: Percentage of devices that have been offline for more than one week
• Call Usage: Average daily minutes each device was in a call

Call Usage Insights on Poly Lens Desktop [Beta]​

Using Poly Lens Desktop, the new Call Usage Insights provides users visibility to their usage patterns to understand how often and when they use their Poly devices throughout the week. To view, open the Poly Lens Desktop app and select Insights.

Site policies and site-wide device reboots are here! These fine-grain controls allow you to customize device configurations for an entire site and help enable a consistent device experience across and within sites. Set up site policies by first setting up your sites (office spaces) under Manage > Sites. Once you have those established, you will see new site policy options start to populate for device models under Manage > Polices for device models that are assigned to those respective sites.

Site-level device controls now let you conduct mass device reboots for a whole site of devices, helping to alleviated widespread troubleshooting issues or speed up routine maintenance. This new tool is located in Manage > Sites > select a site > Device tab.
Note: These features are currently in the “Premium Beta” program to help fine-tune these features and gather more feedback. No additional enrollment is needed to enjoy these new features.

Introducing the Poly Lens Notification Center. Included with Poly+, this premium feature alerts you when a new software update is available for a device model in your inventory in an instant, daily, or weekly roundup email-based alert. Set the alerts up for yourself, your team, or a whole mailing list right within the Poly Lens portal. To get started, you can enable device alerts in two ways:

• Account menu > Manage Accounts > select an account > Notifications
• Account menu > your user name > Notifications

Included with Poly+ is the ability to gain insights into key network performance metrics for your remote workforce right from the Poly Lens portal using the Poly Lens Desktop app. Once a remote device user runs a network test using the Poly Lens Desktop app, navigate to that specific user in the Poly Lens portal by going to Manage > Device User. Key network metrics including upload and download speeds, latency, jitter, and pack loss are currently supported.

We are excited to introduce Poly+, our new service for personal conferencing devices. When a user needs support, Poly+ provides a major value-add for end-users and IT teams alike, with app-to-cloud connectivity which grants greater capabilities while helping troubleshoot issues remotely. Poly+ is stress-prevention for managing technology distributed across a variety of workplaces, giving users and IT departments confidence that they’ve always got the latest in hardware, support, software, and overall quality of conferencing is assured.

Poly+ Includes

• Advance hardware replacement: Replace devices the next business day, before returning the faulty device
• Up to three-year product replacement option: Have the products needed to be productive
• Unlimited, 24x7x365 technical support around the world: Help, how and when you need it (phone, chat, web, live video)
• Exclusive Professional Services discounts for members: Specific Professional Services are discounted saving time and money
• Advanced software features through Poly Lens: With Poly Lens and Poly Lens Desktop app you can access insights around network performance and receive email notifications around important device alerts

Poly+ devices can be entitled right in the Poly Lens portal. After purchasing a Poly+ supported device, you can entitle the device by first logging into your existing Poly Lens account or sign up for a new account. Click the Account menu icon (upper-right corner) > Manage Accounts > Poly+, enter your Activation Key(s), and click Activate when complete. Once all the keys have been activated, assign licenses to devices in your inventory. After the licenses are assigned, all the great Poly+ features in Poly Lens will be enabled and the Poly+ services will be qualified.

Poly+ is currently available for Poly Studio P5, Poly Studio P15, Poly Studio P21, Blackwire 3210, Blackwire 3325, Poly Sync 20, and Voyager 4220 UC.
Note: For further instructions please refer to Poly Lens Help.