IT Support for Architects in London

Managed IT is normally priced per user per month, so the honest answer depends on headcount and scope. What moves the number in a design practice is rarely the headcount itself: it is whether you run your own servers or work entirely in the cloud, how much project data you hold and how far back you must keep it, whether workstations and design software licensing sit inside the agreement and how many offices need covering. Ask every provider to quote the same scope so you can compare like with like and ask specifically what falls outside the monthly fee. Project work, hardware, third-party licences and out-of-hours cover are the usual exclusions and they are where quotes stop being comparable.

Ask questions a generalist cannot answer well. Where would you host our central model and why? What do you specify differently for someone in Revit all day compared with someone running Enscape? How do you handle Autodesk named-user licences when three contract staff join for one job? What would you do differently in the week before a planning submission? You are testing whether they understand that your files are large, your software is unusual and your deadlines are contractual. Then ask two practical questions: who actually answers the phone and will the engineers in this meeting be the ones picking up our tickets.

Yes. It is the core of what we do. That covers where the central model lives and how it performs, worksharing and sync times, linked and federated models, Navisworks coordination and the storage and network underneath all of it. It also covers the unglamorous parts: keeping Revit versions consistent across a project team, scheduling updates so they do not land mid-submission and making sure a restore produces a working central model rather than a file that opens with errors. If model performance is your immediate problem, we would treat that as a diagnosis job first, because the cause is frequently not the workstation.

Yes. Mixed environments are normal in London practices: Revit for delivery, Rhino and Grasshopper for concept and geometry, Vectorworks in studios that never moved to Autodesk and usually SketchUp and AutoCAD alongside. We support the environment those applications depend on, which is where most problems actually sit: workstation specification, graphics drivers, licensing and licence servers, reference and resource file performance and the exchange formats that carry work between them. We are a support specialist rather than a reseller for the design applications, so we will tell you when something is a genuine software limitation rather than a setting we can change.

Yes. Mixed estates are common in design studios: Windows workstations for delivery, Macs across visualisation and graphics and a practice manager who needs both to reach the same files and printers. We manage them alongside each other, covering device management and updates, Microsoft 365 on macOS, endpoint protection, backup and single sign-on so nobody is maintaining two sets of credentials. One honest caveat is application-led rather than ours: Revit does not run natively on macOS. If a Mac user needs Revit we will talk to you about a virtual desktop or a Windows machine rather than pretend there is a neat answer.

Yes. It is most of the work we onboard. The sequence matters more than the speed. We document what you have, identify what is missing (usually backup coverage, administrative account control and licensing records), agree a cut-over that avoids your submission dates, then transfer administrative control of your Microsoft 365 tenant, domains, licences and any on-premise systems. The part practices most often overlook is administrative ownership: if your outgoing provider holds the global admin account or your domain registration, that needs resolving early rather than on the night. We will also tell you plainly where your current setup should be kept.

Usually, but it starts with establishing what is actually slow, because sync time, open time, view navigation and rendering all have different causes. The ones we find most often are central models that have grown without housekeeping, over-linked files, accumulated warnings, latency between the model and the person editing it, storage that cannot keep up with the read pattern and workstations specified without regard to Revit's reliance on single-thread performance for much of its work. Some of those are configuration, some are hardware and some are model hygiene that belongs with your BIM lead rather than with IT. We will be straight with you about which is which.

They need proportionate security and the reason is commercial rather than dramatic. A practice holds drawings and models, client and site information, fee and tender data and correspondence that carries professional liability for years after handover. Construction payment chains are also an established target for invoice redirection fraud. In practice the trigger for most practices is a client questionnaire or a framework bid asking what controls are in place. The controls themselves are not exotic: multi-factor authentication everywhere, sensible conditional access, endpoint protection, backups you have tested, access granted per project and staff who know what to do with a suspicious email.

Yes. The real design questions are where project data lives and how far it sits from the people editing it. A second office, or someone at home on a fast connection, can still have a poor experience with a central model, because worksharing is sensitive to latency rather than bandwidth. Depending on your setup, that points towards a different model host, a virtual desktop approach so the workstation sits next to the data, or Autodesk's cloud collaboration tools. We work through the trade-offs with you on cost, performance and how your teams actually share work, rather than applying the same answer to every practice.

For a typical London practice, a well-run transition takes a few weeks from decision to cut-over and most of that is documentation and preparation rather than downtime. The cut-over itself is usually a single evening or weekend. The realistic constraints are your notice period with your current provider, whether administrative control of your Microsoft 365 tenant and domain can be handed over cleanly and your own project calendar, because we would not move a practice during submission week. If your situation is urgent, say so. The sequence can be compressed, but that should be a deliberate decision rather than an accident.