Moving Offices: An Eight-Week IT Checklist

The costliest mistake in an office move is not a box loaded onto the wrong truck. It is arriving on Monday morning to no internet. Furniture goes in on Friday, the server moves Saturday, but if the line order was placed two weeks before the move, it usually has not arrived. Twenty people sit down at their desks and wait.

This checklist counts back eight weeks from moving day. Treat the timings as a starting point and adjust them to your own date, since every business has a different carrier and a different building.

Weeks eight and seven: questions to ask

The first job is finding out what the building offers. If you have not signed yet, this is leverage in the lease talks.

• Which carriers bring fibre into the building? Some buildings are served by only one carrier, which turns your choice of provider into a constraint.
• Is there in-building cabling, and what shape is it in? Cat6 or old Cat5? How many sockets per desk? Do the “spare” ones actually work?
• Power and UPS. Can a separate circuit be run for the server or network cabinet? Is the panel big enough for new equipment?
• Space for the network cabinet. Ventilated and lockable. Switches inside a cleaning cupboard are more common than you would think.

Place the line order this week. If the building needs to approve works or run new cable, lead times are measured in weeks. Ordering at least eight weeks before the move is the safe side.

Weeks six and five: inventory and decisions

List every device in the old office. Many companies have never produced this list, and on moving day the question “what is this box?” comes up.

Category	Note down	Decision
Computers and laptops	Age, warranty, user	Move, replace or retire
Servers, NAS	Age, role, backup status	Move, or go to cloud?
Switches, access points, firewall	Model, subscription end date, management address	Replacing is often cheaper than moving
Printers and scanners	Network address, who uses them	Move or switch to leasing
Phones, PBX	Extensions, line count	Is number porting needed?
Documents	Cable label plan, network diagram, password vault access	Update for the new office

Answer one question openly at this stage. Will the old infrastructure move, or will the move be the moment to renew it? Boxing up a switch older than three years often costs about as much as the price difference to a new one. If the firewall subscription ends close to the move, going into the new office with a new device makes sense. We worked through that decision in our firewall subscription article.

Week four: plan the server and data move

If the server is physically moving, write down what happens in transit.

1. Take a full backup before the move and restore one file from it to confirm the backup works.
2. Decide which services must stay reachable from outside the office. Where will users work during the move?
3. Write the shutdown and start-up order. If the sequence of domain controller, database and application server is forgotten, services wait on each other.
4. Address plan. If the IP range changes, devices with fixed IPs (printers, cameras, door controllers, backup targets) must be on the list.

Weeks three and two: set up the new office

Plenty of work can be done before the line arrives. Cable testing, switch and access point placement, pre-configuring printers, wireless planning.

• Test every socket with a tester or a laptop. A dead socket should be found today, not on moving day.
• Run a wireless coverage survey. Meeting rooms and the kitchen are often forgotten. For more, see our wireless and network checklist.
• Set up a separate guest network and check the logging obligation under Law No. 5651 in Türkiye.
• Add printers and scanners to the network in advance. Do not leave driver installs to moving day.
• Get written confirmation from the carrier that phone numbers can be ported.

Moving week

Confirm three or four days before the move that the line is actually live. A line can be reported as “connected” while speed, static IP and the firewall link still do not work.

A short plan for the day itself:

• Network cabinet and server first, desks after
• A user name label on every computer
• A technician on site the first morning. In the first two hours most calls are printers, wireless and shared folder connections

Frequently asked questions

When should the line be ordered?

By the longest lead time you face. A few days if the building is ready, weeks if digging or cabling is needed. Ordering at least eight weeks ahead, and planning a mobile data fallback, is safer.

When should the old office line be cancelled?

Not until the new office is fully running and the first week has passed without trouble. One or two months of double payment is cheaper than a day of lost work.

How are backups protected during the move?

Do not pack the backup disk in the same box as the server. Keep one copy in the cloud or at another location. For the duration of the move, that copy is your only safety net.

We have no IT team. Who coordinates?

Line, cabling, removals and device setup come from four different companies. Unless one person ties them together, everyone waits on everyone else on moving day. If you have a managed IT provider, you can include this in the contract.

If your move date is set and you want help planning the IT side, get in touch. We can build the schedule and inventory around your date.