A banking supervisory authority built a full intranet in Arabic on SharePoint — adapting every single component for right to left layout — proving that intranet.ai works even where reading direction reverses every default assumption.
3 Key Project Figures
- ~280 employees covered by the platform
- 279 unique visitors recorded in the first 30 days after launch — virtually the entire organization
- 100% of content built and then fully migrated to Arabic, with right to left layout throughout
Context: An Institution Without an Intranet, a Digital Renewal to Seize
A banking supervisory authority — the local equivalent of a central bank, with approximately 280 employees — had no real intranet. Instead, it had a loosely organized collection of content with informal connections and no single coordination point for daily work.
The opportunity to act came alongside a broader digital renewal: the institution was rebuilding its external website and took the moment to address the internal digital workspace at the same time. The goal was clear from the start — build a true company hub, a centralized environment to replace the fragmented setup that had been in place until then.
The Technical Challenge: A Language That Changes Everything
This project tested patience more than creativity. Two factors, intertwined, made the path much longer than expected.
The first: an infrastructure blockage. For roughly three months, the platform was extremely slow to use, with content not loading correctly. The client initially attributed the issue to the platform itself. The real cause turned out to be the server infrastructure on their end — entirely unrelated to SharePoint or any intranet.ai components. Until it was resolved, the client suspended active collaboration, significantly extending the overall timeline.
The second: right to left SharePoint layout. The intranet was initially built in English. At a certain point, the decision was made to migrate all content into Arabic — and Arabic brings a complete reversal of reading direction. Setting Arabic at the site level in SharePoint was not enough to solve the problem.
The Solution: Component-by-Component Adaptation
Every web part had to be individually verified and corrected. The intranet.ai components were not designed to natively handle RTL logic: in several cases, text overlapped with document icons or graphical elements behaved incorrectly because they were oriented in the opposite direction to their default.
The work required surgical attention to every visual element — a level of care rarely needed in a standard multi-language intranet project, and one that in this case extended to the full SharePoint translation of the entire interface.
The platform structure reflects the institutional and formal nature of the client. This is not a space oriented toward social interaction between colleagues: the home page primarily includes an internal survey section for collecting structured employee feedback, along with rotating informational banners covering Microsoft tools in use — a type of communication consistent with the institutional character of a supervisory authority.
One distinctive feature of the working model: a significant portion of the initial structural build was conducted in close collaboration with the client’s internal ICT team. The institution had strong in-house technical capabilities and took direct ownership of the platform’s skeleton, with intranet.ai providing methodological guidance. Each department — from HR to communications — then populated its own area independently.
Results: Immediate Adoption, Despite Everything
Despite the prolonged blockage, the project reached the finish line. In the thirty days following launch, the platform recorded 279 unique visitors out of approximately 280 total employees — virtually the entire organization had direct contact with the new tool in its first month of life.
A result that likely owes much to distributed governance: numerous internal editors, spread across departments, were already involved in content management before launch. Once the technical problems were resolved, that structure allowed content to grow quickly through the combined work of multiple teams simultaneously, rather than depending on a single centralized management point.
Intelligent intranet search — an interest the client had expressed from the earliest project phases — was temporarily set aside to focus on stabilizing the platform. It remains an open objective for the next phase.
Working with company documents in a fully Arabized environment confirmed a core principle: the structural standardization of intranet.ai holds even when reading direction is reversed — provided each component receives the careful individual attention it requires.
Building a platform in a language that reads from right to left is not just a linguistic challenge: it is an adaptation effort that touches every single visual component, and requires an uncommon level of patience.
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