Opening a Second Office Location: Your IT Checklist

The lease is signed, the furniture is ordered and someone has already picked out the coffee machine. Then, usually about three weeks before opening, somebody asks whether the internet is arranged.

That is the moment a lot of second site openings go wrong, because a business connection is not something you switch on next Tuesday. Getting the IT right for a second office location is mostly a question of sequence, and the first item on the list has the longest lead time.

Start with the connection, months ahead

Order the internet the week you sign the lease. Business fibre can take six to twelve weeks to deliver, and considerably longer if civil works are needed to reach the building. Nobody tells you this until you ask.

Check what is available at the address before you commit to it, ideally before signing. A cheap unit in an industrial estate with poor connectivity is not cheap, and it is the one decision about a second office location that you cannot undo later.

Arrange a temporary fallback as well, usually a mobile connection, so a delayed installation does not become a delayed opening. And decide whether this site needs a backup line permanently. If it will run your telephony and your team cannot work without it, the answer is probably yes.

Then the cabling, before the walls close

Network cabling is dramatically cheaper before the fit-out finishes. Once ceilings are in and walls are painted, every additional point becomes an intrusive job.

Plan more points than you think you need. Desks move, printers relocate, and access points want cabled connections in the ceiling rather than plugged in wherever there is a socket. Add points for the meeting room screen, the door entry system and the card reader if you have one.

Decide where the equipment lives, and make it a proper spot: ventilated, lockable, with power. A cupboard behind a coat rack works until it does not.

What your second office location needs to feel like one company

Here is the part that has genuinely changed. Ten years ago a second site meant linking two networks together so people could reach the same file server. Today, if your files and applications are already in the cloud, both sites are simply two places connecting to the same services.

That makes the whole thing far simpler, provided you have made that move already. If you still run an on-premise server at the main office, opening a second office location is the moment to ask whether that is still the right arrangement, because keeping it means building a link between the sites and accepting that one depends on the other.

The rest is about consistency:

• Same accounts and access. Nobody should have a separate login for the other site.
• Same device setup. Laptops configured identically, enrolled centrally, regardless of which office they land in.
• Telephony that spans both. Internal extensions across sites, calls that can be transferred between them, one set of opening hours rules.
• Wireless coverage designed for the space. Not a router in the corner, but coverage measured against the floor plan.
• Printing and meeting rooms. Small things, but the ones people complain about in week one.

Who fixes it when nobody is there

The question people forget. At your main site, someone technical is usually around. At a second office location, possibly nobody is.

Decide in advance who has physical access to the equipment, who can let an engineer in, and how quickly someone can be on site. Remote management covers most problems, but not a switch that needs power cycling or a cable someone has unplugged with a chair.

Agree this before opening rather than during the first incident, and write down the names. A site with nobody responsible for the cupboard tends to discover that fact on a Friday.

A realistic timeline

Working backwards from opening day: internet ordered at lease signing, cabling planned during the fit-out design, equipment ordered around six weeks out, installation and configuration two to three weeks out, devices prepared for the people who will work there, and a test day where someone actually sits in the space and works normally for a few hours.

That test day is worth insisting on. It surfaces the meeting room screen that will not connect and the corner with no wireless coverage while there is still time to act.

Let us handle the second site

Opening a location is a busy period, and IT is the part where a missed lead time turns into a delayed opening. It is also the part where doing it properly the first time costs a fraction of retrofitting later.

At EvolvingDesk we run this alongside your fit-out. We check what connectivity is available before you sign, order the line early, plan the cabling with your contractor, design the wireless for the actual floor plan, extend your telephony so both sites work as one, and have the devices ready before anyone arrives.

Your team walks in on day one, signs in with the account they already have, and works. Nobody notices the IT, which is the point.

Signing a lease soon? Plan a call before you do, and we will check what the building can actually deliver.

Read more

• What is VoIP, and why are businesses ditching landlines
• How to keep remote workers productive and secure
• Managed IT services at EvolvingDesk

Further reading: the Wi-Fi Alliance overview of wireless standards and the Wikipedia article on structured cabling.