There will come a time when your office space, for whatever reason, needs a change. Moving your operations to a new office takes thoughtful consideration and planning to be successful. Here are a few key topics to consider when moving your office and your information technology infrastructure.

Timing
Timing is everything when it comes to planning your move. Your Internet and voice service provider should be researched, quoted and ordered before you plan your move date. This install date often dictates the entirety of your move.

Service and Support Vendors
If you outsource your IT and phone equipment support service it important to, first, notify these vendors of your intended relocation day and immediately lock in this date with their calendars. Have each of your support vendors review the current state of your infrastructure and verify a physical move will not be unusually disruptive. The vendors should also be required to visit your new office space to verify forward planning and considerations such as network wiring, electrical placement, cooling considerations and generally physical moving requirements. If your core server and networking equipment is contained in a bulking rack mount cabinet have the vendors verify fitment in the new office space from pavement to the final server room. Moving a cabinet can be a physically challenging endeavor. Finally, your vendors should coordinate with each other and thoroughly plan your infrastructure move. It is important to identify which of the vendors will primarily drive the scheduling and project management. Often times this is the IT vendor and secondarily the voice equipment vendor. In any case it is your decision who to define as point person for the move.

Prepare Your Equipment and Data
It is vitally important to visual inspect the physical condition of your equipment an assess the vulnerability with the current office environment. Surrounding equipment, fixtures and overall air quality are major factors in hardware aging and even damage. Inspect the outside of your server both front and back looking for signs of accumulated dust. Chances are there is marginal amount of dust collected on the outside and inside your servers and other computing equipment. Cleaning your equipment carefully before the move provides a proactive maintenance assessment of the current status of your core equipment. Finally, inspect the software condition of your equipment primarily focusing on recommended updates and overall stability of the equipment. All equipment should be rebooted fully before the office move to ensure normal functionality after updates are applied.