ShoreTel Phone Reset: Restoring a Handset to Factory Settings

ShoreTel (now Mitel) IP phones have a factory-reset option built into the handset’s own admin menu, which is useful when a phone is being reassigned, has a corrupted configuration, or needs to be pulled off one ShoreTel/Connect system and re-provisioned onto another.

General Procedure

1. Press the Options/Menu key on the phone (labelled differently across models — look for a gear icon or “Options” softkey).
2. Navigate to Admin (or Advanced/Admin Menu) and enter the admin password. Unless it’s been changed by your administrator, the ShoreTel default is 1234.
3. Select Unit Reset or Restore Factory Defaults (naming varies slightly by phone model/firmware) and confirm.
4. The phone will reboot and clear its stored configuration, including its assigned extension and server settings.

After a factory reset, the phone will need to be re-provisioned — it will typically request a DHCP address and a call-control/FTP server address on next boot, which it gets from your ShoreWare Director / Connect configuration. Check your specific phone model’s admin guide if the menu wording above doesn’t quite match, since ShoreTel’s IP phone range spans several generations of firmware.

Worth Knowing Before You Deploy This Today (Updated for 2026)

If your estate is still on the default 1234 admin password, it’s worth changing it as part of any reset/re-provisioning pass — that default is documented widely enough that it offers essentially no protection against someone with brief physical access to a handset. It’s also worth being aware of the platform’s current status before investing further deployment effort here: ShoreTel is now Mitel MiVoice Connect, and the platform has been in active end-of-life wind-down — add-on and security-patch sales stopped at the end of 2024, extended licence and design support ended at the end of 2025, and full support is scheduled to end in 2029. If you’re resetting and redeploying handsets on a system that’s due for replacement anyway, it’s worth weighing that against prioritising the platform migration instead.

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