Has anyone been able to get the Polycom IP 550 or IP 650 phones to auto answer through speakerphone when requested by the caller ( not provisioned to auto answer all the time)? We just swapped out 55 Grandstream 2000 phones with the Polycoms, and discovered afterwards that dialing “*80” + the extension number does not cause the extension to auto answer through the speakerphone as the Grandstreams did so easily. 
The Grandstreams allowed it with one checkbox, but I can’t find any documentation on how to configure the Polycoms to do it. -Nor can we get the phones to handle system paging through the speakerphone. Any help is tremendously appreciated. 
I have an IP 500 but I presume it would be the same. I have a diverse set of phones and they all take something different to auto-answer. I created a dialplan that looks at the extension and then sends the appropriate alert-info. Here is the one for the Polycom. Works great!
; Polycom IP500
exten => _*80XX,20,Set(__ALERT_INFO=Ring Answer)
you also need to edit the following in your “sip.cfg” file (or setup in the phone if you dont use provisioning)
Thanks for the info, I couldn’t find where to make the change within the phone setup, so I’m going to work on setting up a boot server and provisioning the change through the sip.cfg file. Unfortunately we set up all of the phones manually by logging into the web browswer on each.–YES,… NOT THE SMARTEST PLAN.
THANKS AGAIN FOR YOUR HELP
There are many things that can not be configured via the builtin web server.
If you limit yourself to configuring via the web server you are missing out on much of the flexiblity/functionality that the soundpoint phones offer.
As per other e-mails in this thread “auto answer” can be achieved by putting the appropriate settings into a custom sip.cfg file.
My sip-custom.cfg file contains these lines:
To make this work you need the following lines in extensions.conf or extensions.ael:
SIPAddHeader(Alert-Info: Auto Answer)
Dial …
It works line this:
Asterisk will set the Alert-Info string variable to the value “Auto Answer”.
This string will be passed to the polycom in a SIP header.
The polycom will see that Alert-Info is set to “Auto Answer” and it will map this to ring class “3” (as defined above).
Ring class “3” is predefined for auto answering in sip.cfg so the phone will auto-answer.
If you prefer the phone to emit a ring before it auto-answers user ring class “4” instead".
Or you can get fancy and create your own custom ring class that plays 7 seconds of the Star Wars theme and then auto-answers. The configuration is quite flexible!
-chris