We recently updated some of our old Cisco phones with Yealink phones.  After we updated the phones, we can no longer see the names of incoming callers that are in our contacts list.  Before, the incoming calls would be checked against the contacts list to see if the number was associated with a name, and if so, our old phones would show the name of the caller just like most cell phones.  I did not use the feature, but our receptionist thought it was important to what she does.

After searching the RC website, I learned that to enable caller ID names without using the phonebook requires an account upgrade.  But that isn’t what we want.  We just want to know if RC allows incoming calls to be checked against a contacts list OR is this purely a feature of the desk phones we use?  If it is something we need to setup for each phone, I can do that by uploading the contacts to each phone, but that isn’t very efficient.

It would be easier if we could setup the phones to point to the RC corporate external contacts list for caller ID names.  Is this possible?   What info would we need (e.g. server address, protocol, file format, etc.) to tell the phones where to find our external contacts list?