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
Amy Engineer 
Thanks for sharing this Amy. I had wondered about this myself.
Great post and something I ran into also. I found some awesome info on 8800 phones in this Cisco Live session from last year. Check out page 54 of the slide deck for your scenario. https://www.ciscolive.com/online/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=83758&tclass=popup
Thanks for sharing the link, that’s a great reference to know about!
I just learned today… You will only see missed calls, etc for each individual line on the 88xx phones.
If you have 2 lines, on the 79xx it would display all missed calls to that DEVICE.
On the 88xx you have to click the desired Phone Line, and THEN click the button on the right side for missed/All Calls…
That was a change for me!
Ohh, thanks for sharing that! I hadn’t noticed that yet, but I am sure my users will be pointing it out soon enough…
They also mistake the missed call indicator as a voice mail indicator.
Ran into another “hidden feature”:
Just found out this week that the changes in the way the 88XX series handles park monitoring causes the endpoint to count the parked call against the busy trigger. This is impacting our IPCC agents pretty significantly; if they park a call, then there is no way for UCCX to distribute another call out of the queue due to the busy trigger being set to one. Our agents are in the habit of parking a call, sending an IM and getting back in ready to accept a new call, so this is pretty frustrating for them.
TAC tells me that there is work in progress on this issue… no timeline yet, though. Heads up!
@Kevin, read the release notes for UCCX, because Call Park is unsupported for Agents.
Hi Anthony,
What do you mean the Call Park is not supported for agents?
Call park for these phones, 88xx? What version of UCCX?
Indeed the behaviour of these phones for Call Park is strange and creates a lot of issues.
Does anybody knows how to release the parked call on these phones?
Thanks
On a different note, but related to the subject matter.
Switching out 7945 phones in a building that you may call old, which wiring that has been there for a long time, 15 or more years. I get the “Network Unavailible” error message.
I have had to do various things to fix
– Reseat cable between patch panel and switch
– Replace Cable between phone and wall jack
– Replace Cable between patch panel and switch
I have noticed that the phones come with Cat 5e, and often when I have to replace cable, it is CAT 5. The main difference is between the two types of Cat is the Cat 5e has changes to deal with Crosstalk. Either should work with these phones, right?
I am wonder if I am dealing with old cable that has begun to decay.
Emily @ you may want to check the Length of the cable , if there is any noise , heating close to that Long run cable , I had a similar issue with one of the user and what I found out was that , Cable he was using was passing over an air heater and which will heat up the cable and user will loose the phone connection , if phone will be turned on but will not register.