The Mystery of the Disappearing Polycom Idle Logo

I occasionally have to support customers running very old Polycom SoundPoint IP firmware releases. One of these customers has their company logo installed on their phones as an idle display bitmap (eg. centrally provisioned phone wallpaper). After a recent firmware upgrade at this customer, the logo disappeared, and it took several hours and a fair bit of cursing before we finally found that Polycom had subtly changed the config file syntax.

Assuming that your had your Polycom-related files in a directory of your TFTP server called “polycom”, and under that you had a directory called “bmp” containing your idle display logos, you would need this in your config, to instruct the phone to download the specified logo:

<IP_600 bitmap.IP_600.1.name="polycom/bmp/ip600"/>

And then for firmware revisions 3.0.2 or earlier, the following:

<IDLE_DISPLAY_WIDE ind.anim.IP_600.30.frame.1.bitmap="polycom/bmp/ip600" ind.anim.IP_600.30.frame.1.duration="0"/>

But… if you run firmware revision 3.0.3 or later (excluding the modern 3.3.x series, which uses a totally different system for background logos):

<IDLE_DISPLAY ind.anim.IP_600.29.frame.1.bitmap="ip600" ind.anim.IP_600.29.frame.1.duration="0"/>

Note that the path has been removed from the attribute in the IDLE_DISPLAY tag. Also note that in both cases, the filename extension is not specified – it is assumed to be .bmp (this catches out a lot of people too, it seems).

Fortunately, Polycom seems to have come to their senses a little bit, and removed this multi-frame, animated idle display feature in 3.3.x series firmware, and made it a lot simpler to use. With the 3.3.x firmware you can simply do something like this:

<bitmap.idleDisplay bitmap.idleDisplay.name="http://192.0.2.1/polycom/ip600.bmp"/>