Opening an interstate office: what we did for Brisbane.

A relocation and a second office look similar on a floor plan and behave nothing alike. In a move, everything you have goes from one building to another and the old site stops existing. In a second office, both sites exist at once, permanently, and every assumption that quietly depended on there being one location has to be revisited.

We have just done this ourselves. InterIntra opened an office at 260 Queen St in Brisbane while keeping Adelaide as head office, which put us on the client side of a project we normally run for other people. Some of it went the way we expected. Some of it did not, and those are the parts worth writing down.

The lead-time item is not the internet this time

In a relocation, the connection and the number port set the date because nothing else can be compressed. A second office in a serviced or shared building often inverts that: the building already has internet, and you are on it the day you get keys.

What replaces it as the long pole is identity and access. Deciding how people at the new site authenticate, what they can reach, and what happens to conditional access rules that were written when everyone worked from one city, is the piece that actually takes weeks. It is also the piece nobody schedules, because it does not involve a truck.

Decide early whether the second site is a branch or a peer

This is the single decision that shapes everything downstream, and it is easy to leave implicit until it causes an argument.

• A branch depends on head office. Systems, licences, escalation and decisions all route back. Cheaper and faster to stand up, and it degrades if the link to head office degrades.
• A peer can operate on its own. Its own internet, its own local services where latency demands it, its own ability to keep working when the other site cannot.

Most second offices should start as a branch and be built so they can become a peer without a rebuild. That means not hard-coding head office into things that will be painful to unpick later: no site-locked licensing, no single on-premise dependency that only exists in one city, no DNS or file path that assumes one location.

Microsoft 365 and licensing: check the things tied to a place

Most of Microsoft 365 does not care where anyone sits, which is why the exceptions catch people out. Work through:

• Conditional access and named locations. If you have policies keyed to your head office IP range, staff at the new site will either be blocked or, worse, silently granted an exception somebody added in a hurry and never removed.
• Teams calling and emergency addresses. Calling plans carry a registered emergency location per user. It is a compliance detail, not a nice-to-have, and it is wrong by default the moment someone moves city.
• Data residency. Worth confirming rather than assuming, particularly if any client contract specifies where data sits.
• Per-site software and hardware licensing. Anything licensed to an address, a site or a MAC address needs reissuing, exactly as it would in a move.
• Print, scan-to-folder and anything with a static address. These are configured once, forgotten, then rediscovered at the new site.

See Microsoft 365 management for how we handle the tenant side of this.

Support coverage is a promise, so scope it honestly

Here is the part we had to be disciplined about ourselves. Our Adelaide clients have an on-site response target of under four hours for critical issues, and that target is financially backed: miss it and the client is compensated automatically.

That promise works in Adelaide because thirty-five specialists sit behind it. A brand-new site cannot backstop that on day one, however good the people are. Whoever is there can be on leave, or already on another job, and the clock breaches.

So we scoped it differently rather than copying it across. Everything delivered by the whole team, meaning help desk, monitoring, Microsoft 365, cyber security and project work, carries the same service levels in Brisbane from day one, because none of it depends on anyone being in the room. On-site attendance is offered across the Brisbane CBD and inner suburbs by arrangement, and the fixed clock arrives when the local team is deep enough to stand behind it.

If you are opening a second site with staff who support customers, do the same exercise. Separate what your whole team delivers from what depends on one person being available, and only put a clock on the first category.

The unglamorous list

Things that surfaced later than they should have:

• Your address is now plural. Website, invoices, email signatures, contracts, letterhead. Inconsistent address data across the web quietly undermines local search for both locations, so change them together rather than as you notice them.
• Google Business Profile deserves a decision, not a default. A listing needs a permanent, staffed location with its own signage. A shared or serviced office frequently does not qualify, and a listing that gets suspended can take the account with it, including the established listing you already rely on. We chose not to list Brisbane yet for exactly this reason.
• Shared-building networks are somebody else's network. You do not control the firewall, the segmentation, or who else is on the same infrastructure. Assume the building network is hostile and design accordingly.
• Asset register per site, from day one. Retrofitting location onto an asset list that never had it is worse than it sounds.
• Backups and recovery assumptions. A recovery plan written for one site often assumes the people and the equipment are in the same place.
• Who has keys, after hours, at the new site. Including building access, not just your own door.

One person has to own it, and it should not be the person moving

A second office has a landlord or building manager, a carrier, an IT provider and whoever is relocating, all working to a date. The person physically going is the worst choice to coordinate it, because they are simultaneously the one packing, meeting clients and learning a new city. Give the coordination to someone at head office who can chase things without a time-zone or attention penalty.

If you are opening a second site, or you have opened one and the IT has not caught up, the useful conversation is about which assumptions still hold. We do this for clients and we have now done it to ourselves. See IT support in Brisbane, or book a 30-minute call.