Construction and trades businesses don’t run their day from a desk. Estimators, site supervisors and crews need email, drawings and files on phones, tablets and laptops wherever the job is, and the office still needs its accounts and printers working.
Between 19 August 2025 and 18 August 2026, 12 concrete, plumbing, joinery, roofing, electrical and construction businesses we support raised 155 tickets with us, including replies. We logged 84.9 hours of work. Here’s what that looked like.
A second office, set up properly
When a concrete contractor opened a second office, we went on site to set it up. The two all-in-one PCs the business had bought came with Windows 11 Home, so we upgraded both to Windows 11 Pro, joined them to the business’s Microsoft 365 accounts, installed the Office apps and brought them under our device management and security. We set up the new printer, including scanning to email, and started scoping a move for files one person kept in Google Drive into OneDrive and SharePoint as the team grows.
One company’s IT split in two
A construction group running two trading entities needed them separated. We logged six hours splitting them into their own Microsoft 365 tenancies, migrating mail, configuring SharePoint and setting up email signatures for the second business. Later in the year, a licence audit covered both.
Email off a registrar’s hosting
A fit-out contractor’s email ran on a hosted Exchange service from its domain registrar, and it kept being unavailable. We set up a new Microsoft 365 tenancy, exported the old mail, added the email security records to the domain, imported the mail into the new mailbox and set up email on the user’s phone. That took three and a half hours.
Storage, computers and a long list
A concrete business had a network storage device put in during July 2026, a three-hour job. Another had a computer flagged at end of life replaced and set up, and computers set up for two staff in a single four-and-a-half hour job.
One construction company’s single biggest ticket logged 11.6 hours against a list of outstanding items. Another business moved its files from Dropbox to OneDrive.
Phones, tablets and email on the move
Many of the smaller tickets were about the mobile side: setting up email and iCloud on a new iPad, email not working on a phone, Outlook on a new Mac needing a licence, problems with the authenticator app, and time zone and working hours settings.
What a trades business with mobile crews should have in place
Based on the year’s work, this is what we’d want every trades business to have sorted.
- Multi-factor sign-in on every account, including accounts used only on site phones.
- Shared files in SharePoint, not personal drives, so drawings and job files stay in one place when someone leaves.
- Phones and tablets that can be wiped remotely if they’re lost on site.
- Business-grade computers, bought with the right version of Windows, so a new office isn’t held up upgrading them.
- Email on Microsoft 365 directly, rather than on hosting you don’t control.
- One standard for every office, so a new site is set up the same way as the first.
If you’d like us to check your site and office setup, get in touch.