Skip to main content

​
Desk phone star codes

A star code is a short number you dial exactly like a call: lift the handset, dial the code, listen to the confirmation, hang up. Orbit desk phones (Yealink, Polycom, Cisco, and Grandstream handsets provisioned by your administrator) recognise the codes in this guide without any dashboard, softphone, or web login in front of you.

​
Who this guide is for

  • Handset-only users. Your phone registered on its own when it was plugged in, and the codes below are the whole workflow: toggle do-not-disturb, check voicemail, retrieve a parked call, or flag a malicious call without ever opening a browser.
  • Telephony administrators. Each section ends with where the behaviour is configured, so you can roll the codes out alongside zero-touch provisioning and answer “what do I dial for…?” questions with one table.
Every code speaks a confirmation before it hangs up, so you always know whether it took effect. A code the platform does not handle says “That feature code is not available on this device” rather than dropping you into dead air.

​
The code table

Do-not-disturb is per phone, not per person: on a shared desk phone, *78 silences that handset only, and your colleagues’ devices keep ringing. Park retrieve is the opposite — per organisation: any registered phone in your organisation can retrieve any slot.

​
Walkthroughs

​
Toggle do-not-disturb (*78 / *79)

  1. Lift the handset and dial *78.
  2. You hear “Do not disturb is now on. Incoming calls to this device will not ring.” and the call ends by itself.
  3. When you are ready to take calls again, dial *79 and hear “Do not disturb is now off. This device will ring again.”
What a caller hears while you are DND. Your phone is removed from the ringing targets for your numbers, so the caller never hears your phone ring. The call continues with whatever else the inbound route specifies — another device on the route, a queue, or the configured fallback such as your voicemail. The toggle takes effect from the very next inbound call. Your administrator can set the same do-not-disturb flag for your extension from the dashboard; both ends always show the same state, so a *79 from the handset also clears a DND that was set on the web.

​
Check voicemail from your own extension (*97)

  1. Dial *97.
  2. If your organisation protects mailboxes with a PIN, you hear “Please enter your voicemail PIN, followed by the pound key.” Enter your 4–8 digit PIN and press #. A wrong PIN says “Incorrect PIN. Please re-enter your voicemail PIN, followed by the pound key.” and gives you three tries in total.
  3. The mailbox then speaks the count — “You have 2 new messages.” — plays each unheard message in order (“Message 1.” followed by the recording), and closes with “End of messages. Goodbye.” Messages you heard are marked as heard.
  4. With nothing waiting, you hear “You have no new voicemail messages. Goodbye.”
Your mailbox is the set of numbers whose inbound route rings your extension, so *97 reads the same messages you would hear dialled in from outside. If the handset says “No voicemail box is configured for this device,” your extension is not the ring target of any number yet — ask your administrator to route a number to it.

​
Retrieve a parked call (*1–*9)

  1. A colleague parks a caller and notes the slot number, 1 through 9 — the same slots shown in the Parked Calls lobby.
  2. From any registered phone in the organisation, dial * followed by the slot, for example *3.
  3. On success there is no announcement: your leg is bridged into the held caller’s lobby and the conversation continues as if you had answered. If someone else already retrieved the call, or the slot is empty, you hear “There is no call parked on 3. Please check the park number and try again.”
When two phones dial the same slot at once, exactly one of them wins the call; the other hears the “no call parked” message.

​
Trace a malicious call (*57)

  1. Hang up on the nuisance or threatening call.
  2. Dial *57 immediately afterwards.
  3. You hear “This call has been flagged for a malicious call trace. The originating number has been preserved for your service provider’s abuse team. Goodbye.” The same flag can be raised from the dashboard, and both produce the identical trace record.
If there is no eligible recent inbound call on your line — for example the trace window has passed — you hear “We could not find a recent call to trace on this line. Please dial this code again immediately after the call you want to report. Goodbye.”

​
Where administrators configure each behaviour

Nothing on the handset needs provisioning per code: once a phone is registered, every code in the table above works on it.

​
Limits and codes that do not match

  • *72 / *73 (call forward on/off) are not star codes today. Per-user forwarding lives in Me → Voice preferences under the ring modes — “Forward all calls” and “Forward after timeout.” Dialing *72 or *73 speaks the “not available on this device” prompt.
  • Star codes are read from the dialed destination your phone sends, including full SIP and tel: forms, so the codes also work when your extension registers through a forwarded trunk or session border controller. A trailing # send key is stripped automatically.
  • One mailbox per extension. *97 always reads the mailbox belonging to the extension the phone registered as; there is no code to open someone else’s mailbox, with or without their PIN.
  • The code set is deliberately small. Anything outside the table above speaks “That feature code is not available on this device. Please contact your administrator.” and ends the call cleanly.

​
Troubleshooting

“That feature code is not available on this device.” Either the code is not one the platform handles (see Limits), or the phone is not registered as an enabled extension. Confirm the handset shows as registered and your administrator has not disabled the credential, per Extensions and desk phones. Do-not-disturb is on but my calls still ring. DND applies to the phone that dialed *78, not to you as a person. If your inbound route rings more than one credential — for example your desk phone and your softphone — the other device still rings. Toggle DND on the device the calls actually reach, or use Voice preferences for user-level rules. My voicemail PIN is not accepted. Enter the digits followed by #; you have three attempts per call. Your administrator sets and resets the PIN from the extension’s provisioning settings. If you never received one, your organisation may not require a PIN at all, in which case *97 plays messages straight after the count. “There is no call parked on N.” The slot is empty, or another phone retrieved the call first. Check the slot number against the Parked Calls lobby, or ask the colleague who parked the call which slot they used.