I’m sharing this because this took me forever to figure out, and I’m hoping that this bit of information does someone some good.
I have a Polycom VVX 500 VoIP phone. This phone is USB enabled, and it so far it’s recognized every USB headset I’ve plugged into it (which has probably been two); however, when I plugged in my headset, the volume would reset to the median setting after every call. It wouldn’t do that when I connected it through the headset port, however, so I just plugged it in via the headset port and left well enough alone.
That changed today, as I picked up a Plantronics Voyager Legend headset. The headset only came with a small USB dongle — no way to wire it into the headset jack on the phone. That’s fine — it’s working great so far, I love the way it fits, I love how well it works with the phone, and I love that it came with its own carrying case — that doubles as a battery-powered charger! But, my old problem resurfaced — each time I make a call, the volume resets to the middle setting.
After scouring around the web today, I finally found a helpful answer on the Polycom forums, which also describes why this setting even exists in the first place (apparently, some countries have laws that require the phone’s volume to reset to its default setting after each call). Here’s how to make it work:
- You’ll need to enable the web interface, if you haven’t done so already. To do this, go into the settings app and go to Advanced (the default admin password is 456)->Administration Settings->Web Server Configuration->Web Server and set it to Enabled. Set Web Config Mode to something other than Disabled (I suggest setting it to HTTP Only.) Exit out of the menu. (The phone will probably reboot at this point. Wait for it to come back up before proceeding to the next step.)
- On your computer, pull up a web browser and type in the phone’s IP address. (You can find this in the settings app under Status->Network->TCP/IP Parameters.)
- Log in as the admin user (again, the default password is 456).
- Go to Utilities->Import & Export Configuration.
- In your favorite text editor, create a file with the following contents (yes, it’s just one line):
<Volume voice.volume.persist.usbHeadset="1"/>
- Under Import Configuration, click Choose File. Choose the file you created in the previous step, and click Import.
Now you should be done! The phone should remember your volume preferences between calls now.