1) This is usually what dictates the timescales for the rest of the move. You need to talk to your SP as soon as possible as they may need to do site surveys etc. and there is always a lead time. Last position i had was at Network Rail and some of the places we had to connect up took ages simply because of their remote location.
2) Yes. Make sure you are absolutely clear on how you want the patch panels set up as this can make the difference between easy and not so easy maintenance in the future.
2a) Do not forget about power to the racks and if needed redundant power supplies. Make sure you provide enough power to the racks for the current equipment but also try to think of future requirements. An example would be where you are not running VOIP currently. You may move into the new office and then decided 6 months down the line you want to run VOIP. You may then need to upgrade the power supplies to your racks. Better to get the right ones in now if you can see requirements coming down the line.
3) Yes, and you would want them all powered up, tested before moving any servers/desktop in there. Also you need to connect to the WAN so you are dependant on 1) above.
4) This is done when you have a fully functioning LAN room with WAN connectivity. If you were provisioning new servers then you could overlap with some of the above but if you are moving existing servers you will need to have the network up and running beforehand.
You don't need to complete them all in a weekend unless you only have access to the new building 2 days before you go live. Everything other than step 4 should have been done before the weekend of the move. Trust me, there are always a few surprises when you start moving servers/clients into a new building.
If timescales are really tight, get 2 and 2a done before the weekend. Arrange to have the last mile connected up at the start of the weekend. And then 3 & 4 could be done over the weekend. But i would strongly recommend against this approach as there is little room for error.
I have assumed as it is an office environment that there are not huge amounts of servers etc. Also i've made the assumption that you don't have a huge amount of networked printers etc.
Finally, a lot depends on the importance of the work this office does. If outages loose a lot of money or are safety critical etc. you may need to take extra steps.
With one of the moves i was involved with we would never have been able to do it over a weekend, we had multiple WAN connections, mainframe connectivity etc. So we temporarily setup a bridged connection between the old site and the new site so we could move in phased stages. I'm not saying this is what you should do but be aware there are always other alternatives.
Jon
