Just a quick post in case there is at least one other person in the world that didn’t know this particular trick for the 8800* series phones that always go off hook on the last line used.  In case you weren’t aware that these phones had this behavior, don’t worry, as soon as you deploy one to a receptionist that handles more than a single phone line, you WILL be made aware. You may not survive the encounter, but you will know…

Should the user let you live long enough to research a solution, you will find that TAC doesn’t offer you any hope in restoring the requisite amount of receptionist happiness to keep oxygen flowing to your lungs. TAC will politely inform you that the phone is operating as designed and that you might want to buy the receptionist some flowers instead.  Okay, maybe that last part was my idea…

Technically TAC is right, you cannot force the phone back to selecting the primary line after hanging up a call that was answered or placed on any of the other lines. However, as my awesomely brilliant coworker discovered, you can change the behavior of the phone so that when calls come in they are DISPLAYED on the primary line.

This way, when the user hangs ups, the phone still has the primary line selected, even if the last call received was for one of the other lines on the phone. This mimics a behavior users have come to know and love of the older generation of phones, a behavior users who manage multiple lines desperately want back.

You can set this option on the phone configuration page, just search for Show All Calls and change the feature to Enabled.

This won’t make the remembering-the-last-line-selected-for-off-hook behavior go away, but it does make its impact far less noticeable to end users who might otherwise want to plot your demise.

* In this case we were working with 8841 phones, but my coworker has used this trick in the past on 9971 phones, so I’d be inclined to believe this would work on pretty much any SIP phone that has this behavior. 

Published 04/11/2016