Company Overview

One of the leading Construction Management firms in the Southern California area was facing high expansion, they needed to move their Corporate Headquarters office from downtown to a newly purchased and renovated office.

Project Summary

As the company With the move, the company planned to abandon their current digital PBX phone system and moving to a Voice over IP system. Server room and all other assets are moving to the new location. New high-tech furniture was to replace existing at the new location. Project involved moving all carrier services & network equipment, create network redundancy to handle Voice over IP failover, and setup wireless features in conference rooms, integrate new phone system with existing business systems, and integrate physical security & facilities operations.

The Challenges

The new location will be an open office layout with community areas for users to work wirelessly. Wireless needs to be secure, but have the ability to seamlessly roam from place to place without dropping connections. Phones & Internet must be up at all times during the move. All employees need to have proper training to do their jobs at the new location.

• Find a structured cabling company to handle installation of data cabling for all locations
  • Coordinate with furniture vendor to makes sure cabling is installed correctly
  • Install floor boxes at main locations so cabling is hidden from view
• Specify and deploy Voice over IP system
  • Migrate existing phone numbers
  • Train users on new features
  • Train internal IT on how to administer the system
  • Integrate with conference rooms, conference calling & collaboration systems
• Integrate physical security and facilities systems
  • Find vendors and integrate features with internal network
• Move carrier services and equipment, coordinated with day of move

Structured Cabling

Customer did a complete renovation on the building stripping out all existing cabling. We chose a structure cable installer that would be available to meet our timeline and flexible enough to work with last minute design alterations. The new specification called for an open ceiling making it difficult to hide wiring. Instead, we chose decorative cable trays to keep the cable in view and add to the look of the building.

To get cabling to the floor without dropping down from the ceiling, floor boxes were mounted in strategic locations under the floor. This required trenching existing concrete, installing conduit and floor boxes, then fill in with new concrete.

Furniture came equipped with features to install cabling & power. Floor boxes, electrical & cabling installation needed to be coordinated to take advantage of these features while keeping cabling out of view.

All data cables terminated on patch panels in 2nd floor Server Room. We specified equipment and pathways need to ensure cabling could be adequately terminated in the rack.

Phone System

We retired the digital PBX & deployed the new Voice over IP prior to the move. This made it easier to move as the new system offers better mobility features and phones could exist at both sites without porting any numbers over until it was time to terminate the old system.

After reviewing 4 different vendors, Shoretel was chosen as the final system due to the price and portability features. Customer had a datacenter presence in a Colocation facility which was utilized for additional failover.

 

A dual switch method was used to ensure that the company could handle a complete systems failure at one location and still have a working phone system. Multiple connection paths were setup so that no single failure would take the whole system offline. Incoming voice lines were duplicated at each location so if the main office sustained a failover, all numbers would ring through to the datacenter. Multiple Internet vendors were used so that if one vendor failed, access would automatically fail over to a different provider. Private point-to-point connectivity between the datacenter and the corporate office was backed up using redundant VPN connections to protect them from a private line failure.

Conference Rooms

A large pain point at the old location was the mismatch mess of cables in conference rooms to connect phones and digital displays. To get around this, conference rooms were equipped with an AirMedia wireless presentation device and integrated sound. The main boardroom contained a rack of equipment that handled hands free calling though microphones and speakers in the ceiling.

The boardroom was very large. An 85″ digital flat panel was installed on the wall with a 113″ ceiling mounted projector and screen hidden from view. In the event that more presentation space was needed, the screen automatically rolls down from the ceiling, and the display is switch to the projector at the push of a button.

The whole system was controlled by a 7″ touchscreen located in the middle of the table. Special resolution hardware resizes the screen to the alternative presentation method so the presenter doesn’t need to change anything on their computer.

Once integrated, a series of training sessions were conducted with office staff to give them hands on knowledge how to use the computer, Outlook & Conferencing together with calling.

IT was give special training on how to administer the system, create extensions, assign phones and troubleshoot problems.

Facilities Integration

HVAC systems & physical security were connected to the network so that Heating, Air Conditioning, Alarm, Access Control & Video Surveillance could be managed from a remote or mobile device. Facilities personnel were training on administration of each system.

This allowed for easy changes when the company scheduled a special event in the office or were working on a weekend.

Carrier Services

Deals were made with existing carrier services prior to move so that a technical project manager was assigned to each service. This allowed us to coordinate cutover to happen on a specific date and time so no loss of service occurred. Because the new phone system was deployed ahead of time, the old phone system could be easily configured to forward calls. This way porting the phone numbers to the new service and terminating the old was completely seamless to end users.

From the beginning of the move to its completion, no loss of service occurred. Users were able to work any hours they needed to and move at their leisure.

Vendor Agreements Managed by this project:

• Structured Cabling provider
• Conference room Audio/Visual provider
• Physical Security vendor/installer
• Electricians
• Movers
• Internet & Voice carriers
• Phone system vendors
• HVAC providers
• Furniture installers
• Concrete contractors