Custom Corporate Intranet Portal: SSO, Automation, Development

Custom Corporate Intranet Portal

When your company hits 50 employees, the chaos of scattered information becomes critical. Documents in one place, news in another, CRM in a third—employees waste up to 30% of their time searching for data. Off-the-shelf solutions like SharePoint, Bitrix24, or Confluence work for simple scenarios, but when you need non-standard approval workflows, deep integration with legacy 1C systems, or strict security requirements, you hit a wall. That’s when you need a custom intranet portal. We’ve been building these for over 8 years and have delivered more than 50 projects for companies sized 50 to 5000 employees.

Typical Problems We Solve

Information fragmentation. A custom intranet unifies everything in one interface: news feed, structured knowledge base, universal search across all documents. No more jumping between systems.

Complex approvals. Travel requests, equipment purchases, vacation approvals often require multiple managers. Without automation, the process drags on for days. Our form builder and approval workflow engine cuts processing time to 2–4 hours per request.

No central directory. Active Directory or 1C:ZUP data—employee contacts, org chart, skills—all synchronized into a single searchable directory.

How We Do It: Stack and a Case Study

For one client (IT company, 300 employees), we built a portal using Laravel 11 with React 18. Front-end SSR with Next.js 14. Database: PostgreSQL. Search: Meilisearch. Authentication: SAML 2.0 via ADFS. Implementation took 3.5 months.

The core module was a request builder with dynamic forms and sequential approval stages. For example, a purchase request: employee fills the form, system checks budget, sends to department head, then to financial director. At each step—instant notification to Telegram.

"The portal cut approval time from two days to three hours," said the client’s IT head.

We chose Laravel for its mature ecosystem, built-in queue for notifications, and easy integration with REST APIs. Next.js ensures fast page loads and SEO-friendliness for public parts. Meilisearch provides near-instant full-text search across all documents.

Our Process (Not a Fixed Price)

1. Discovery (1–2 weeks). We analyze your business processes, gather requirements from key departments, and define the MVP.
2. Design (2–3 weeks). We create prototypes, agree on portal structure, and produce a detailed technical specification.
3. Development (2–6 months). Backend, frontend, integrations. We run 2-week sprints with demos at the end of each.
4. Testing (2–4 weeks). Functional, load, security testing. We write automated tests.
5. Launch and support. Deploy to your server or cloud, train admins, provide ongoing support.

What You Get

• Full documentation: architecture description, admin guide, user manual.
• Source code and all rights to it.
• Server and CI/CD access.
• Team training (2–3 days).
• 3 months of technical support (extendable).

Timeline Estimates

MVP: from 3 months. Full-featured intranet: 5 to 9 months. Cost is determined after analysis—contact us for a project assessment.

Security Measures

All traffic over HTTPS. Sessions with optional IP binding. An audit log records every action: who, when, what changed. Two-factor authentication via TOTP. Access restrictions by IP or VPN. For government organizations—certified cryptography.

Supported Integrations

Integration with 1C

Integration with 1C is done via REST API (HTTP services) or file exchange (CommerceML). We synchronize directories (employees, departments) and documents (requests, vacations) in real time or on schedule. For clients using 1C:ZUP, this reduces manual data entry by 70%.

Mobile Access

As a Progressive Web App (PWA), employees access the intranet from their smartphones without going through an app store. Push notifications via FCM for important announcements and approval reminders.

With over 8 years of experience, we deliver robust portals tailored to your requirements. Contact us for a consultation—we’ll prepare a proposal within two business days. Request a project estimate today.

Development of Corporate Portals and Internal Systems

We specialize in developing corporate portals — CRM, ERP, LMS, and Intranet. Each project starts not with landing page layout, but with how business rules will be embedded into the architecture: who sees which data, how 1C and accounting systems sync, how 500 contacts turn into 500,000 without performance degradation. Over 7 years, we have delivered over 40 portals for companies with 50 to 5000 employees. We will evaluate your project in two business days — just contact us.

A public website can be launched without detailed design — iteratively improved based on feedback. With a corporate portal, this approach does not work: the cost of fixing architectural decisions after launch for 200 users is incomparably higher. Therefore, we spend 70% of our time on analysis and prototyping, and write code only after the role matrix and integration scheme are approved.

Three areas where bad decisions are often made: access rights model, performance on large data, and real-time updates.

How to build a role model for 30 departments?

Access rights model. "A manager sees only their own clients, a department head sees the entire department, a director sees the whole company, but financial data is visible only to the CFO and above." This is not three roles — it's a matrix of roles, permissions, organizational units, and record ownership. Implementing it with if ($user->role === 'manager') in controllers will make the code unmaintainable after six months.

The correct approach: Spatie Laravel Permission for basic role model + Policy classes for object-level permission (can('view', $deal) checks not only the role but also ownership). For complex hierarchical structures — ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control) instead of RBAC.

Performance on large data. CRM with 500,000 contacts, filtering by 10 fields, sorting by activity — a naive implementation yields 15-second queries. Composite indexes, denormalization of aggregates (last_activity_at on the record itself instead of MAX over related table), Elasticsearch for full-text search on contacts.

Real-time updates. Multiple employees working on the same document or task. Without WebSocket — constant setInterval with polling every 5 seconds, extra server load, update delays. Laravel Broadcasting + Pusher/Soketi or a custom WebSocket server on Node.js — for notifications and real-time changes.

CRM Systems

Typical set: contacts, companies, deals, activities, sales funnel, reports. Technically straightforward. The complexity lies in the details.

Pipeline with custom stages. Every company wants its own funnel. Stages must be configurable without deployment. Table pipeline_stages with position, color, is_final, probability — and drag-and-drop for reordering on UI (React DnD or dnd-kit).

Change history. Who and when changed a deal status, reassigned a responsible person, added a note. Audit log via Observer or spatie/laravel-activitylog. On UI — timeline with filtering by activity type.

Email integration. IMAP/SMTP for connecting corporate mailbox, automatic linking of incoming emails to contacts by email address. This works reliably only with proper handling of bounces, spam, auto-replies — filtering is required.

Why is ERP not about code but about data?

ERP is when CRM, warehouse, production, accounting, and HR are unified into a single system. Full ERP from scratch is rare (usually integrating with existing systems), but modular systems for specific businesses are common.

Key principle: financial operations must be immutable. Not UPDATE orders SET status = 'cancelled' — but creating a new record order_cancellations with a reference to the original order. This is the immutable ledger principle, which simplifies auditing and reconciliation.

Integration with 1C is almost always part of an ERP project. Two-way synchronization: from 1C to portal (directories, balances, prices) and from portal to 1C (orders, documents). RabbitMQ as an event bus between systems is more reliable than direct HTTP interaction — if 1C is unavailable, messages wait in the queue.

How are LMS structured: learning platforms?

Learning Management System — courses, modules, lessons, tests, certificates, user progress.

Video content is the most demanding part of an LMS. Storing video on your own server and serving via Nginx is a bad idea: expensive, slow, no adaptive bitrate. Correct approach: upload to S3/Cloudflare R2, transcode via AWS Elemental MediaConvert or Mux, HLS playlist for adaptive streaming via Video.js or Plyr.

Viewing progress — periodic sending of watch_position from the frontend (every 10–30 seconds), storage in Redis with periodic synchronization to PostgreSQL. Do not save every second to the database — it will kill performance.

SCORM compatibility — if integration with corporate training materials is needed. Separate module, there are ready libraries (scorm-again).

Intranet and HR Portals

Corporate intranet: news, documents, organizational structure, HR processes (vacations, requests, KPIs).

Organizational structure in the database is a hierarchical structure. Adjacency list (parent_id on each record) is simple to implement but slow for recursive queries. Nested Sets or Closure Table are faster for reading hierarchies, more complex for changes. In PostgreSQL — recursive CTEs (WITH RECURSIVE) with adjacency list — a balance between simplicity and performance.

Document and request approval — workflow engine. Simple linear approvals (employee → manager → HR → accountant) can be done without a special engine. Non-linear (parallel branches, conditional transitions, delegation) — consider ready solutions: Temporal.io for workflow orchestration or a custom state machine based on the state-machine pattern.

What is included in the work

When ordering a corporate portal development, you receive:

• Architectural documentation (ER diagrams, integration scheme, role matrix)
• Full code in a Git repository with CI/CD
• Access to infrastructure (hosting, databases, storage)
• Training for administrators and key users (2–3 sessions)
• Warranty support for 3 months after launch

Our design principles rely on official Laravel documentation on authorization (Policies) and recommendations for working with queues.

Technical Stack for Portals

Timeline Estimates

The cost is calculated individually after a detailed analysis of requirements and role model. To get a preliminary estimate, contact us — we will analyze your task and offer an optimal turnkey solution.