It is easy to turn a corporate portal into a shop window: news, birthday greetings, photos from parties. People open such a portal in the first week and forget it by the second. A portal people actually use starts somewhere else — with the tasks employees handle every day and currently handle awkwardly.
Below are the features worth starting with, and the ones that can sensibly wait.
The problem first, then the features
Before listing modules, it helps to understand where the company loses time today. The picture is usually similar:
- requests to IT and facilities get lost in email and messengers, with no queue and no statuses;
- a new employee spends weeks figuring out whom to ask;
- HR sends emails and documents by hand and adds newcomers to work chats one by one;
- managers cannot see how many requests are open or where processes get stuck.
Each of these is a candidate for the first version. That is exactly how our IntraLink case began: the company’s internal life was scattered across email, messengers and spreadsheets, and the portal brought it into one place.
Requests and IT support
The most useful feature of a first version is almost always requests. An employee files a request to IT, facilities or accounting and sees what happens to it. The person handling it works with a queue instead of a stream of emails.
The minimum set:
- a request form with categories, so each request goes straight to the right person;
- statuses — received, in progress, done — and a history of changes;
- comments and attachments, so nobody has to go back to email;
- a queue for the people handling requests and a summary for the manager.
Requests give the portal daily traffic. Someone who logs in to check the status of their request will notice everything else along the way.
Employees, contacts and the org chart
The second most important feature answers the question “whom do I ask?“. A staff directory with job titles, departments and contacts, the company structure and, if there are several offices or one large office, a floor map with workplaces.
This looks simple, but the main difficulty is not the interface but the data. The directory has to update itself — from the HR system or the user account directory. A directory maintained by hand goes stale within a couple of months, and employees stop trusting it.
HR features
HR processes are the third candidate for the first round, especially if the company is growing and hiring regularly. The usual things to automate are:
- onboarding — a notice to the team, adding the newcomer to corporate groups and chats, a list of first steps;
- vacancies and offers — publishing, tracking candidates and preparing documents;
- an employee account — documents, applications, leave information.
A good test: how many manual steps HR takes for every new hire. If there are a dozen, automation pays off quickly.
Notifications
A portal should not wait to be opened. Notifications bring the employee in at the right moment: a request is done, a document is waiting for approval, a newcomer has joined the team.
Where notifications arrive matters. Email or the work messenger suits office staff. People who work outside the office need push notifications in a mobile app. That is why portals often have a mobile version: in IntraLink, the web portal is complemented by a Flutter app for iOS and Android with push notifications.
And it is important not to overdo it. If the portal sends ten notifications a day, people stop reading them. Fewer, but relevant, is better.
What can wait
The first version can do without:
- a news feed and department blogs — useful, but they do not create a daily reason to log in;
- advanced analytics across every process — a summary of requests is enough at the start;
- internal social features, likes, ratings;
- a full-scale knowledge base — better to start with answers to the most frequent questions.
All of this can be added in iterations, once it is clear what employees actually use.
Integrations and hosting
A portal almost never lives on its own. It needs employee data from the HR system, sign-in with corporate accounts and sometimes a link to the accounting system and the work messenger. It is best to list the integrations before the estimate: they strongly affect the timeline and cost.
A separate question is where the portal runs. Many companies want employee data to stay inside their own perimeter. A custom portal can be deployed on your servers or in the cloud of your choice.
How to launch it so people use it
Even a good portal may not take root if you simply open it to everyone on a Monday. A calm launch in a few steps helps:
- A pilot with one department. A few weeks with a small group reveal the awkward spots before the whole company sees them.
- Data from day one. The staff directory, the org chart and open requests should be in the portal at launch, not trickle in later. An empty portal makes a poor first impression.
- One channel for requests. If requests are still accepted by email and in the messenger, the portal becomes one more place to lose them. It is better to agree that requests go through the portal only.
- A short one-page guide and a person to turn to with questions during the first weeks.
- Feedback. The first month is the time to collect comments and ship small improvements quickly: employees see that they are heard.
Timeline and cost
A full portal with web and mobile versions, requests, an org chart, HR processes and integrations starts at RUB 8 million and takes 5–7 months to build. But there is no need to wait half a year. In IntraLink, the first version — personal accounts, the org chart and IT support requests — was running on a test environment by the end of the third month, and the HR module and the mobile app followed.
More about portal development is on the corporate portal page, and the whole path from task to launch is in the IntraLink case.
A portal becomes necessary not when it has many sections, but when employees open it on their own, without reminders. Usually to check what is happening with their request.
