A company intranet built to open on every office computer

By late summer the client ran about a dozen internal web apps: project and field tools, finance dashboards, pursuit research, meeting notes, time off, and social media. Each lived at its own address with its own sign-in. People asked where things were, and company news, documents, and the staff directory lived in different places again.

The goal was a front door: one page that opens by default on every office computer, with the news, people, documents, and tools staff need, that admins can keep current themselves.

The hub came in two steps.

First, a launcher. One page listing 14 systems in six groups: projects and the field, money, winning work, people and communication, AI research, and two Salvus AI tools the team opens from their desks. We deliberately did not embed the apps in frames. Every app sits behind its own sign-in, so an embed would just show a login box. Instead, each tile says what the app is for, how you get in, and whether it is up right now. The page sits behind an access code and is hidden from search engines, because it maps what the company runs internally.

Second, the intranet itself.

• Home: greeting, date and weather, division cards, recent documents, company updates, the app launcher, and upcoming dates.
• Division pages: each division's team, projects, updates, documents, and apps.
• People: a searchable directory with division and department filters, reporting lines, editable profiles, and an org chart drawn as a tree colored by division.
• Documents and policies: upload files to private storage with signed downloads, link to SharePoint or OneDrive, or write pages directly.
• Calendar with holidays preloaded, and a project hub filtered by status, sector, and division.
• IT support: tickets with priorities, assignment, replies, internal notes, and notifications.
• Search across people, documents, projects, updates, and apps from anywhere on the site.
• Edit mode for admins: a pencil on every item that comes from the database, add buttons on each section, and click-to-rewrite page titles and headings. No developer needed to change the content.

Sign-in started as an emailed link plus a code, and was simplified on launch day to one password box. The office password signs in to a shared staff account that can read everything and open IT tickets, and that stays hidden from the directory. Admins click a link under the box and sign in with their own email and password. Public sign-ups are off, and a database rule only accepts company addresses. A side benefit: the client's mail filter opens every link in incoming mail, and with no emailed sign-in it has nothing to use up. The tradeoff is stated plainly in the setup notes: tickets opened on the shared login show the shared account as the author, so staff add their name.

Four roles (staff, editor, IT, admin) decide who can post updates, manage documents, work tickets, or change people and settings. Those rules are enforced by the database on all 14 tables, not just hidden in the interface.

Making it the default home page is a script, not a request to every employee. It sets the home page, the home button, and the startup page in both Edge and Chrome through machine policy. IT can run it on each computer or push the same settings from its device management console, and a remove switch undoes it.

The directory was loaded from the client's time-off app, which already held the verified org chart: names, titles, departments, and reporting lines, with departments mapped to divisions.

Two problems were caught before anyone hit them. A blank setting for allowed email domains would not have fallen back to its default, so the login would have refused every user; it was replaced before launch. And the launcher's status check once called a dead app healthy, because a missing app on the host returns "not found" rather than failing to connect. It now counts a sign-in wall as healthy and any other "not found" style answer as down, which we confirmed by pointing it at an app that does not exist.

The launcher is live, and all 14 systems reported healthy at launch. The intranet is live behind its own sign-in, and outside checks confirmed it redirects strangers to sign-in and refuses outside addresses without leaving anything behind.

It is still rolling out. The staff and admin accounts are created by hand, and that step was pending at the last log. Picture and layout editing for admins (change a banner photo, move or resize a section) is built and waiting to be released. When IT is ready, the intranet moves to the company's own address and the home page script points every office computer at it.