Preparation - What should happen before the day of the cabinet tidy

Ideally we would visit site for a survey of your cabinet prior to the day of the data cabinet tidy. Such a visit would take us about 20 minutes to do the survey, plus whatever time was required to answer any questions that you'd have.

In the event of a survey not being possible, it would be useful if you could supply us with a few photos of the cabinet in question

Having said that, in my previous life, most of the cabinet tidies that I did were ones where I was given minimal prior information. Meaning that I have plenty of experience in "Blind Date" type data cabinet tidies. And that I would expect to tidy your cabinet to the highest standards, regardless of whether I've seen the cabinet before or not. It just might take me a bit longer to do it without a prior survey.


The Who, What, Where, When

There are a few basic details that we would like from you, in order to proceed with a professional cabinet tidy.

  1. Where. The address that the cabinet is located at.
  2. When. The time and the date for the tidy. This should be at a time that will minimise disruption for your business. Most often this will be a Saturday. But it could be at any time or day of the year. It's all down to whenever is best for you.
  3. Who. The name of the site contact and ideally their phone number. This is the person that will give us access to data cabinet.
  4. Who. The name and phone number of someone from the Network Management Team. They should be available at the end of the tidy to check that all switches in the affected area are up. In a managed network we would also phone this team prior to starting work, as a courtesy to them.
  5. Who. The name and number of someone from the Server Management / Wintel Team - if there are any servers that will need to be shut down in order to successfully complete the cabinet tidy.
  6. What. A general idea of what you are looking for. Most of the time it will be to tidy up a cabinet that looks like a huge bowl of spaghetti. Or it could be that you require us for some other service, for example; you are setting up a new site and want someone to do the patching work for this.
  7. What. Details of the cabinet itself to allow us to estimate how many cable management bars and patch leads will be required.

Change Control & letting your users know

It's not our place to tell you how to run your IT. However, we would expect any Change Control documents required for the work to be done by us to have been raised by you prior to the start of any work

We would also expect you to notify all affected users in advance that there will be disruption to their network connection whilst the tidy is being carried out.