dpsguard Cisco sold 100 million of these Cisco phones and many of those are now available at low price and these phones look much nicer than any other phones
Yikes! Even Yealink phones looks much better than Cisco Ones. After more than 10 years involved in VoIP I always say that the worst phones to use with asterisk are the Cisco ones, specially those with 7XXX, just make a quick search on google and you will see how every cheap user that is not willing to pay for a decent SIP phone are having issues with those "nicer" cisco phones.
dpsguard but I cannot then start Asterisk as there must be some integration / links between the GUI and Asterisk that are lost.
You actually can download the asterisk source code, patch and compile it to use it with FreePBX or Issabel/Elastix I have done that before, you only need to edit conf files specially the manager.conf and others in /etc that i don't recall right now to have the GUI connected to asterisk.
dpsguard so why will Issabel team not include this patch to allow support of Cisco 7xxx, 6xxx, 9xxx phones?
Opensource are always glad to receive fixes, patches and new features so please help with that.