I totally agree with Paolo here. As hard as I have tried to like the 6900/8900/9900 series phones, they are just inferior to the 7900. Stick with what works.

PS- Phone Designer is EoL and will not work on any phone going forward.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6789/ps9829/end_of_life_notice_c51-663729.html

I echo my colleagues here, as I got a chance to play with them about a year ago. On a positive note the latest firmware files have addressed many limitations/caveats/bugs.

My recommandation would be to buy couple of these and evaluate them, test the typical feature you use at your organization and see if it will meet your standards.

HTH,

Chris

Thanks for the feedback!  I already own a couple of these phones and am testing them for features (that is how I found out VisualVoicemail and Phone Designer didn't work).  I was hoping someone else out there is already using these phones and could either give specific examples of what else doesn't work, or could state that they are working fine in their enviroment.  We've already cut our teeth on deploying the 9951's and that was quite the learning curve (mostly because of SIP peculiarities).  So I thought if I deploy the 8945's as SCCP, I could avoid most of that.

I've used 79xx series phone and have been years without having to upgrade them, having owned the 8945 phones for about a year we have upgraded twice to resolve bugs.

The latest 9.3.2 upgrade to resolve issues with Time Display failed due to the fact the phones could not upgrade without power supplies attached to them.  8945 phones failed to upgrade over POE.  I would suggest purchasing power bricks for the 89xx series phones and plan on upgrading frequently.

I completely concur with all these comments, we have a deployment of over 4K+ plus SCCP 8945 and they are nothing but trouble. We cautiously used 7965 SCCP for contact centre and switchboard and as you expect they ares solid as a rock.

Moreover, be very wary with them if you use 802.1X on your network. We have an outstanding TAC case open that has been dragging on for months where if you software reset an 8945 from CUCM, the 801.1X authentication will fail and the phone will be quarantined. We had to manually put 4K+ MAC address in Cisco ISE for MAB otherwise we could have a potentially very nasty incident at a major hospital, not good!!!!!!

Jonathan Schulenberg wrote:
I totally agree with Paolo here. As hard as I have tried to like the 6900/8900/9900 series phones, they are just inferior to the 7900. Stick with what works.

Unfortunately, I believe Cisco's aim is to ultimately kill off the 79xx range and force us to use 69xx/89xx/99xx phones.

I'm already in moring for the 7911

IMHO, it would be better if there was some consistency across the range of phones, but they all have their own weird ways of working

GTG

FWIW, the Visual Voicemail feature was added to 8941/8945 IP phone models starting in firmware version 9.3(4).