Understanding Phone Provisioning

Overview

Phone provisioning is used for automatic configurations of selected hardware SIP phones. Phone provisioning means:

• The phone automatically connects to the PBX after booting and is assigned a phone extension.
• Extensions are managed in the administration interface.
• If you confirm or plan it, the system will perform an automatic restart of provisioned phones if needed.
• Phone firmware is automatically updated.
• Displaying a company logo on hardware phones is supported by Kerio Operator.
• Company contacts are accessed through LDAP.

Description

This is how the automatic phone provisioning works:

• The telephone boots in the network and sends a DHCP request for an IP address.
• DHCP server accepts the request, assigns an IP address and sends it back in a DHCP reply. Besides the IP address, the message also contains TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server address — Kerio Operator, in our case.
• SIP phone connects to TFTP server integrated with Kerio Operator.
• Kerio Operator checks whether the phone is new:
  • if it is new, Kerio Operator generates a new phone extension for the phone;
  • if it is not new, Kerio Operator finds the extension that the phone has used.
• Kerio Operator generates a configuration file suitable for the particular phone type and sends it via the TFTP protocol.
• The phone is configured using the values it has acquired in the configuration file and is ready to be used.