The office move IT checklist.

Short answer: the IT side of an office move fails in a predictable order: internet ordered too late, phone numbers ported wrong, cabling assumed, servers moved with no verified backup. Every one of those is avoidable if you start six weeks out. This is the sequence we use when we move a business, including one we moved across four towns with effectively no downtime.

Six weeks out: order the internet

The single most common move disaster is a finished office with no connection in it. Business circuits can take weeks to install, and longer when the building needs construction. Order first. If you can, order before the lease ink is dry.

Plan the overlap while you are at it. The new office should be live before the old one goes dark, because the alternative is a gap where the business runs on someone’s phone hotspot.

Four weeks out: walk the space with wiring in mind

Count where people sit, where the printers go, where the access points need to be. Older buildings and mill spaces rarely have the cabling you are hoping for, and finding that out four weeks early turns a crisis into a work order.

Plan Wi-Fi as coverage, not as a box. An access point per open area beats one router in a closet, every time, in every building.

Three weeks out: phones and the number

Your main number is the business. Porting it takes coordination between carriers, and the rule is simple: the number must ring somewhere at every hour of the move. Forwarding bridges the gap while the port completes.

A modern phone system makes this far easier, because the phone follows the person instead of the wall jack. If your phones still depend on the wall, the move is the natural moment to fix that.

Two weeks out: treat the server move like surgery

Full backup, verified, before anything is unplugged. Not scheduled. Verified. Someone has restored a file from it and looked at the contents.

Then decide what actually moves. A move is the cheapest moment to retire old equipment, because it is already unplugged. Some of it belongs on new hardware, some of it belongs in the cloud, and some of it belongs in the recycling pile with its drives wiped.

Label everything and photograph the racks before they come apart. Future you, standing in the new server room at nine at night, will be grateful.

Move weekend: the sequence

Last backup at the old office. Shut down in order. Transport. Then power up in the reverse order people expect: network first, then servers, then workstations. A room full of computers is useless until the thing they all talk to is awake.

Day one: the test list

The move is done when the list passes, not when the boxes are empty. Can everyone log in. Do the phones ring in and out. Does email send and receive. Do the shared files open. Does every printer print. Do the card machines take a payment. Fifteen minutes of checking, and the week starts as a work week instead of a support ticket.

We have run this sequence enough times to trust it, including moving a business across four towns, phone system, servers and storage included, with effectively no downtime. The checklist is not glamorous. It is what keeps a move from becoming the story your staff tell for years.