Advertising a room for Poly Content App to Find

[Adam in DC]

I would like to make the Polycom Content App more user-friendly to staff in our meeting rooms by having the rooms show up in "Nearby Rooms."

Unfortunately, there seems to be no published way to do this.  As my attached JPG shows - it sees a nearby room via the descriptor "Phone" and its IP address.  However, that same unit shows up in Recent Rooms with the more helpful "Trio 8500 Spare."

I have 4 rooms with Trio 8800s - all named - and 3 rooms with Group 500 or 700 series.  While the USB connection on the Trios makes naming less of an issue - but the Group series in our rooms doesn't offer a USB sharing option.  

The Trios all are seen by my HP Switches as SIP devices - so are on a .6 subnet.  The Group Series are not seen as SIP devices - and are on a .3 subnet - the same as workstations.  

Sharing during video calls would be much easier if all the rooms were advertised properly.  Otherwise, I'm going to have to put up a sign in the room with the IP address.  

[Adam in DC]

I found some documentation on the "Pano App" which seems to be 99% the same as the Poly Content App.  The secret may be in Bluetooth.  For a Trio - turn on Bluetooth and also copy the system name - assuming it's a good one - into the Bluetooth Name Advertisement field.  

It's very location based - so the closer you are to the device - the more likely it will pop up.

I don't think Group Series Units have Bluetooth - so will have to research that more.  

[Rob In Austin · Accepted solution]

Hi Adam,

One of our SE's brought this to my attention last week. I've been trying to think of a simple-ish response to the query... but unfortunately there isn't one. While it's true we don't publish the details of our discovery process, it isn't due to secrecy. Instead, the discovery of endpoints by Content App varies somewhat based on which Poly endpoint is used and as well as the OS Content App is running on.

Discovery mechanisms:

1. Orion/Pholio BLE announcements: this is an older and deprecated process that was only supported with Pano when subscribed to our short lived Orion service
2. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) iBeacon announcements
   This is the primary and easiest means by which Content App discovers an endpoint. On the endpoint, an android based service/app, at a regular interval (every few seconds I believe, modelled on Apple TV) will performs an iBeacon announcement. Content App is actively listening for iBeacons that have contain our custom uuid+payload date. When detected, Content App will try to connect to the endpoint and query system name via TCP port 5001 (the "traditional People+Content IP" application port). Apple (the originator of the technology) has a good write up on iBeacons here:

iBeacon signals

Supported OS's

• Windows 10 (I think redstone 1 was needed - circa 2016)
• MacOS X 10.10 or higher (circa 2016)

Supported Endpoints

• Trio
• Pano
• G7500
• X30/X50
• any derivative of the above four product lines (basically Pano or thereafter)

Group 300,500,700 systems can only be discovered if they are paired with a Trio (or possibly a Pano, I could check if interested).

I believe the port 5001 number is mentioned in the voice / video admin guides as being also used for discovery.

Part 2 - The system name query

How the device advertises itself to Content App may vary.

Trio - When the feature came out, the name Content App received via discover was the always the Trio system name. However, I think that changed (I want to say in fall '19) and they added support for specifying a separate room/device name.
Pano/G7500 and above - on these devices, you can change "Room Name" in system settings that is used for Content App discovery

Part 3 - Custom beacon

As the discovery process ultimately relies on a BLE device sending iBeacon advertisements with the endpoints IPv4 address, a passive implementation could potentially be implemented. Our iBeacon implementation is actually modelled after the Apple TV iBeacon adverts (they too send out the devices IPv4 address). During development, we made use of various USB dongles that supported, iBeacon advertisements. For reference on such devices see here:

BLE beacons 

You could then configure a single Linux box or even Raspberry pi to listen for the name queries and reply back with the desired response.

Whew! Well, there you have it. If this is something you are interested in, I could post some bash scripting (for advertising) and sample C/java code (just ~30 lines) to service the name query.

I hope this helps!

Best Regards,
Robert Murphy

p.s. Content App = Pano App - it was renamed sometime (a good year or so) after the Pano hardware product was released

[Adam in DC]

Thanks for the detailed response.  This will help many people in the future!