IntraLink: a corporate portal with a mobile app for employees

Task

Client: A company with several offices and a staff of a few hundred people

The internal life of the company was scattered across email, messengers and shared spreadsheets. New hires spent weeks figuring out whom to ask, and IT support requests got lost in chats and were handled without a clear queue.

HR handled vacancies and offers by hand: emails, documents and adding newcomers to work chats were done from scratch every time. Managers could not see how many requests were open or where processes got stuck.

The client needed a single portal that is just as convenient on a laptop as on a phone: many employees work outside the office and use company services only from a smartphone.

Goals

1. 01 Give every employee a personal account with the information and contacts they need
2. 02 Move IT support requests into one system with a queue and statuses
3. 03 Show the company structure and the office map so that newcomers find people on their own
4. 04 Automate HR processes: vacancies, offers, notifications about new hires
5. 05 Add newcomers to company groups and chats without manual work
6. 06 Release an iOS and Android app together with the web version

Solution

• Personal accounts

  Employees get access to a personalized cabinet where they can find important information and interact with colleagues

  
• Technical support system

  The built-in ticketing system helps to quickly resolve technical issues, ensuring uninterrupted operation

• Interactive office map

  The office map and organizational structure help employees find the right contacts and navigate the company

• HR management and automation

  Support for HR processes: creating vacancies, sending offers, notifications and automatically adding new employees to corporate channels

• Integration with corporate channels

  New employees are automatically added to corporate groups and chats, which speeds up adaptation and information

• Analytics and reporting

  The platform collects data on applications and employee activity, providing management with useful information for evaluating effectiveness

  

Timeline

1. Month 1

   Requirements, design and specification

   Interviews with HR, IT support and managers, a process map, design mockups of the web version and the app, a technical specification with integrations.

2. Months 2–3

   First version

   Personal accounts, the org chart, IT support requests. A demo every 2 weeks; by the end of month three, a working version on the staging server.

3. Months 4–5

   HR module and mobile app

   Vacancies and offers, notifications, automatic chat onboarding, the office map. A Flutter app for iOS and Android with push notifications.

4. Month 6

   Testing and launch

   Load and functional testing, checks on the client scenarios, publishing to the app stores, launch and a 6-month warranty.

What was hard

• One product on three platforms

  The web version and the apps had to behave the same. A shared backend and one access model kept the logic in one place, and Flutter let us build iOS and Android from a single codebase.

• Access rights from the org chart

  What an employee sees depends on their department and role, and the structure keeps changing. Rights are derived from the org chart, so moving an employee needs no manual setup.

• Integration with company channels

  Adding newcomers to groups and chats went through external services with their own limits. We built a task queue with retries, so an outage of an external service does not break onboarding.

Result

• Internal information, contacts and requests live in one portal instead of email and spreadsheets
• IT support requests go into one queue with statuses, and managers see them in reports
• A new employee finds colleagues on the office map and in the org chart on their own
• Vacancies, offers and chat onboarding are handled in the app, without manual emails
• Employees outside the office use the portal from their phones

Technologies

• Svelte
• Flutter
• Dart
• Python
• FastAPI
• PostgreSQL
• Docker
• Firebase