It's been an incredibly busy year. Since January, the big office move consumed more and more of my time culminating in what I can say is nothing less than a 100% success in terms of smoothness of transition and invisible downtime despite some significant challenges.
This was a new space being built and some serious delays in the construction schedule pushed our move in date closer and closer to our lease termination. Something had to give, and that had to be proper planning.
No amount of contingency can accommodate a shrinking schedule. Sure you can mitigate a lot by re-evaluating your plans to get as much pre-configured as possible, but in the end the only thing you can do is lower expectations. Given my challenges, between the schedule and the loss of my assistant, lowering expectations is what made a prominent entry in my contingencies.
No less daunting was the fact I was transitioning to a new ISP, a new type of ethernet-over-copper circuit, a new dial tone provider, a new phone system, a gigabit ethernet network including all new switch equipment.
So much new, one would think that we'd have new servers and be able to take advantage of the change for new equipment. No such luck. I brought over the old DC's, the Firebox; file, web and application servers. The only new server was to move the print services off of a DC and onto it's own box (which will ultimately do some file serving later on).
I'm very happy to report that the cut-over resulted in just 4 hours of mail and web server downtime which occurred after-hours late on a Friday night. When the users came back to the office on Sunday, they had full internet, file and print access ready to go.
My work was far from over, with 3 new ceiling projectors, 3 new HDTV's (lobby display, lounge television and a conference room display), 3 new copiers and a new plotter. The phone system was being adapted into an electronic check in-out board, so several kiosk computers had to be deployed and built.
In the end, long hours and a bit of luck carried the day and added so much more to the sense of accomplishment for such a huge job.
Next up; a complete refresh and review of my SharePoint Construction Management site.Labels: work