A concrete contractor opened a new office in northern New South Wales, just over the Queensland border. The business bought two new all-in-one PCs and a printer for it, and asked us to come and set them up. When the request came in, all three were still in their boxes.
We logged 7.75 hours on the job, including travel, between the request in early August 2026 and closing it off later that month.
What the new office needed
The request was clear about the basics. Two PCs, each with more than one user, set up with proper security. A printer that everyone could use. And a question about the files one staff member had been keeping in her own cloud storage, which the team would need to share as it grew.
It also flagged something we’d need to deal with first: the PCs came with Windows 11 Home.
Getting off Windows 11 Home
A home edition of Windows is built for a household, not a business. It isn’t designed to be joined to a business’s accounts and managed centrally the way the rest of the business’s machines are.
So before anything else, we upgraded both PCs to Windows 11 Pro during initial setup, using Pro licence keys the business had purchased, restarted them and activated the licences. Doing it at that point meant nobody set up a profile on a machine that was about to change underneath them.
Setting up the PCs
With Pro in place, two of our technicians:
- signed both PCs in with the two users’ Microsoft 365 business accounts
- installed the Office desktop apps
- installed PDF editing software on the machine that needed it
- added our remote support tool, so we can help without a drive over the border
- added our device monitoring and security software
That last step is what puts the new office on the same footing as everywhere else. A fault or a threat at the new office gets picked up the same way it would at head office.
The printer and scanner
Next was the printer. We set it up on both PCs and on a laptop, set up scanning from the PCs, and set up scan to email through a mail relay service so scans arrive in people’s inboxes. We added the email addresses the office asked for to the printer’s contact list and recorded the printer’s details in our documentation.
Scan to email is often the first part of a printer set-up to stop working when a password or mail setting changes. Having it documented from day one makes that fix quicker.
Where they landed
The new office has two PCs on Windows 11 Pro, signed in with the business’s accounts and monitored, and a printer that prints and scans to email. We closed the job once the site visit was done and the outstanding requests were dealt with.
The shared files question is the next step. Files kept in one person’s cloud storage work for one person. For a growing team, they belong in OneDrive and SharePoint, where access can be given and taken away properly.
If you’re opening a new site, check the Windows edition on any PCs before you buy them, and tell your IT provider the opening date early.
If you’d like help planning a new site’s set-up, get in touch.