Company Growth Support:

The Project:

Realizing that they were outgrowing their current office, one of our financial industry clients, requested our assistance in planning a complete office move. With seven months before the move happens, Axxys was able to provide the client with a complete checklist of business and IT considerations that would need to be addressed as they selected a new office location. Once the office was space was secured, Axxys worked closely with the client, new building management and the office construction/design teams to ensure that every consideration for the client’s business and technology needs were addressed and managed properly. Key to the design of the office was the support of the client’s infrastructure, so careful detail had to be paid to the setup of their on-premise server room to ensure that space, ventilation/cooling, ample power/correct power connectors and physical security implemented properly for supporting a seamless technology upgrade and transition.

Since the client was experiencing growth within its team, additional connectivity for the new office would have to be addressed which meant adding new Cisco switching and additional APC battery backup alongside the current servers, switches, router, firewall and voice system. Additionally, upon completion of the new office space build out, Axxys performed a wireless assessment of the new space providing heat map of optimal wireless AP positioning and units needed to deliver complete wireless coverage for the client’s production network, as well as for their guest network. An additional 23 phones and two conference room phones for employees and meeting spaces were secured from Allworx.

As office locations and workstation furniture layouts were assigned, Axxys brought in our national cabling partner Nationwide Network Technologies Inc. to run all the network cabling and data drops needed for data, voice and wireless installations. Once the cabling was complete, Axxys preinstalled the Meraki wireless Access Points in preparation for infrastructure move.

As part of the process, the client wanted a way to manage both office’s email signatures and make sure that the new office address for Plano was assigned correctly for their different teams. To do this, Axxys implemented the Exclaimer Signature Manager and setup signature templates for both office that could be applied directly Active Directory groups through group policies. This gave the client a single signature that could be updated by one person and applied company wide with no additional steps needed from the employees.

With long ISP and Telco lead times, Axxys worked closely with both Level 3 Communications and Logix to set specific dates and times for the installation of transferred voice and data services. For the day of the move, voice services for the Plano office were forwarded to the client’s Houston office, and data circuits switched on for the new location. By transitioning the infrastructure at the end of day on Friday, Axxys was able to minimize business interruptions while the technology was moved. Upon arrival to the new location, the infrastructure was reinstalled with new additions and powered on for test and configuration. Voice services were transferred back to the Plano location and voice systems reestablished locally. With everything connected, configured, tested and working properly computers, docking stations, monitors, phones and printers were setup and configured for the new network addresses.

Axxys budgeted 43 hours for planning, implementation, configuration and deployment of business technologies to the new location. The project was successfully completed 9 hours under budget.

Technologies Implemented:

• Allworx Phones (25)
• Allworx Licensing
• APC
• Cisco Switch (3)
• Cisco Licensing
• Cisco SMARTnet
• Exclaimer Signature Manager
• Meraki APs (7)
• Meraki Licensing