Call Waiting on Cisco 6921, 6941 and 6961 Handsets

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7th October 2011

Call Waiting on Cisco 6900 Series handsets

An additional update to one of our previous posts.

As mentioned previously, the Cisco 6900 series handsets only support one call per line. This means that Call Waiting, which is supported on 99.9% of other handsets does not work on the 6900s out of the box. The only way to configure Call Waiting is to assign a line to another button on the handset (assuming you have one spare) and then configure “call forward busy” on the first line to send calls to this.

Only one word for this. Ugly.

Buyer beware. The 6900s look very attractive because of their price point, however the more we see, the less we like.

6900 Series Handset

Barry Hesk

Cisco CP-6921 handset restrictions

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15 September 2011

Cisco have recently marked as end of sale the CP-7911 handset which is a “work horse” handset for many customer deployments. The 6921, featuring a headset port and full duplex speakerphone which the 7911 didn’t have, seems to be an attractive option however there are a few of restrictions to be aware of.

1. The 6921 whilst being a two line phone does not support two calls per button. The second channel can only be used for transfer or conference. This is unlike the way that the 7911 operates which provides two calls per button.

2. DND does not work on the handset when mapped to a softkey. This is an issue that is known by Cisco and there is a workaround of setting it to the 2nd button. However, if you want to use the 2nd button as a second line, you can’t use DND. This does not sound great to us.

3. Auto Answer on headsets. Other Cisco handsets that support auto answer on headsets provide the ability to play a “zip” tone on auto answer so that the agent knows a call has just arrived. The 6921 does NOT support this tone and we don’t know why. It can seemingly play the tone for internal calls, however it does not play it for external calls. Cisco TAC confirm that this is expected behaviour however we haven’t been able to find any documentation that reflects this. It also seems like a very strange restriction. Net result, we’d be loath to recommend 6921s with headsets if you want auto answer.

So all in all, be careful how you deploy 6921s. They are not as attractive as they appear at first glance.

Barry Hesk

Cisco EoS Announcements

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Aug 2011

In recent weeks, Cisco Systems have announced a slew of End of Sale (EoS) notices including the entire Unity voicemail line (as predicated by Intrinsic in an earlier post)

Unity is now officially EoS with Unity Connection being the recommended replacement product. Cisco Speech Connect, which provides Speech Recognition services to voicemail deployments is also EoS as a standalone product, as it has now been integrated into Unity Connection 8.5.

Also subject to EoS are the Cisco 7921 wireless handset (replaced with the more expensive 7925 version) and a couple of Gigabit models of the 2960 switch which are replaced with 2960S versions. Cisco 7911 handsets are also now EoS with the recommended replacement being the 6921.

Barry Hesk