Rebuilding a Legacy Intranet That 800 Employees Actually Use

The Challenge

An industrial supply company with 800 employees across 12 locations had a SharePoint 2013 intranet with 9% monthly active usage. Safety procedures lived in binders on the shop floor. HR forms were PDFs emailed to a shared inbox. New hire onboarding took 3 weeks because training materials were scattered across network drives, email threads, and a wiki nobody maintained. The IT team had been asked to "fix the intranet" three times in five years — each attempt stalled because of scope creep and poor adoption.

Our Approach

We ran a 3-week discovery sprint: shadowing warehouse supervisors, interviewing office managers, and analyzing which SharePoint pages actually got traffic (answer: the lunch menu and the holiday calendar). We designed a role-based intranet with three distinct entry points — warehouse floor, branch office, and corporate — each showing only what that user type needs. Key features: a searchable safety procedure library with version control and acknowledgment tracking, digital HR forms with approval workflows, and a structured onboarding portal that guides new hires through their first 30 days with checklists and assigned mentors. We built on a modern React frontend with a Laravel API backend, migrated only the content that was actually being used (about 15% of what was in SharePoint), and launched in 11 weeks with a phased rollout: corporate first, then branch offices, then warehouse floor.

The Results