I've posted about this topic more than a year ago, but it seems that Cisco has no interest to make available a provisioning system targeted at this type of market (after all, these phones are targeted to "small businesses", that is, to environments with few devices, thus this decision is somewhat understandable).

So we only have tools such the SPC (SIP Profile Compiler) or vi/notepad to play with for this job.

I hope to be helpful by describing my case. I needed to provision and manage about 40 SPA phones distributed in several locations (and for different companies) around my nation. After some design consideration, I've choosen to make an XML file named spa$PSN.cfg available via TFTP at each location (the TFTP server IP address is provided as DHCP option to the phones), which provides the following fields:

    http://provision.mypublicdomain.com/companyname/spa$PSN.cfg

    http://provision.mypublicdomain.com/companyname/$SN.cfg

On the other and, the web server http://provision.mypublicdomain.com publishes all configuration files compiled and encrypted with the command "spc --scramble [sharedkey] filename.txt filename.cfg"

The file spa$PSN.cfg contains all common settings I whish to define for the specific company (timezone, language, firmware version, dictionary files, interval time for configuration resync, etc.). firmware and dictionary files are also provided via HTTP by the same web server.

The file $SN.cfg contains user-specific configurations (SIP account username and password, BLFs, speed dials, etc.).

Al text files are in the "proprietary plain-text" format described at page 37 in the document "Cisco Small Business IP Telephony Provisioning Guide", and their "change management" is maintained by using the good old RCS (Revisions Control System) method on the same unix server.

That implementation fits pretty well for me and several customers I have deployed the same "provisioning system" for, the biggest of whom is operating about 100 SIP phones.