An Italian energy group unified two intranets built on completely different technologies in just one month during a company merger — recording 41,000 accesses and 30 minutes of average daily usage within the first few weeks.
3 key project metrics
- 41,000+ accesses in the first month
- 30 minutes average daily session per user
- 1 month to go live
When two companies merge, everything that seemed obvious has to be renegotiated: how to communicate, where to find information, who speaks to whom. The intranet is no exception. In most cases it isn’t even the same system — two different technologies, two architectures, two completely distinct ways of organizing content.
That is exactly what happened at an Italian energy group on a strong growth trajectory, engaged in an acquisition strategy that had brought several different companies under the same roof, including a business focused on solar energy.
The parent company ran an external portal with a publishing logic fundamentally different from SharePoint. The acquired company already had an intranet built on intranet.ai — and it worked so well that employees talked about it as a small internal success story. When the time came to give the entire group a single platform, the choice was almost natural: take what already worked and make it the standard for everyone.
It was not simple. It was one of the most intense projects our team has ever delivered, compressed into one month that would normally have taken at least two or three. But it is also one of the projects with the best results in such a short time.
The challenge: two companies, two technologies, one deadline
The core issue was not purely technical — it was the distance between two worlds.
The parent company’s portal used a content publishing logic that looked nothing like SharePoint: pages organized in silos, a news management system that felt more like a social network than a corporate portal, and a level of complexity such that even its long-time managers could not accurately estimate how many pages it actually contained. Mapping discursive information scattered across links proved especially difficult.
The smaller company, the one already running intranet.ai, had full visibility of its own content because it had built it alongside our team. But this very asymmetry made the unification work more delicate: the goal was to bring everyone to the same level without either group feeling they had lost something in the transition.
On top of all this: a non-negotiable deadline. Go live was set for just over one month after project kickoff.
This meant compressing the analysis phase — normally a matter of weeks — into just four days: orienting ourselves in an unfamiliar portal, deciding what to recover, what to leave behind, and how to translate everything into a new structure. The outcome was a project nearly triple its original scope: from an estimated 30–45 pages to 59 pages actually delivered, all within one month.
Our solution: an architecture designed to grow with the company
The first strategic decision was to design not for the present, but for the future.
Knowing the group would continue to grow through acquisitions, the new intranet architecture was designed from the start to expand without needing to be redesigned each time.
At the center sits a hub site — the entry point from which all users, regardless of which company they belong to, reach the information they need. Around this core we built:
- Two document subsites: one for the acquired company’s archives, the other for operational and maintenance content
- A dedicated HR vertical site, rich enough to function almost as a second intranet within the intranet — with internal home pages, information boxes, and guided communication around contracts, benefits, and welfare
- A fourth compliance site, fully structured and populated, ready to be activated whenever the group decides to open it to users
For the HR area, the goal was that users should never feel they had left the main intranet. A small contact banner at the bottom of each page proved particularly effective: the HR team confirmed that requests now arrive at the correct addresses, meaning users find what they need without having to search twice.
The most invisible — but most labour-intensive — work was migrating the news. Moving content from a system that published articles like social media posts, often without coherent images, to an ordered structure linked to reference documents required careful manual matching, item by item, preserving even the original publication dates to maintain chronological order.
The architecture relies on intelligent intranet search across all sites, a unified people directory, multi-language intranet support for distributed teams, and structured company documents management — features that stop being optional in a merger context.
The results: one month in, the most-used platform in the company
Just weeks after launch, the numbers tell a story of adoption that goes far beyond the expectations of a project delivered under such compressed conditions.
- 41,000+ total accesses in the first month, with daily peaks of 2,000–3,000 visits in the days immediately after go live
- 30 minutes of average daily session per user — a figure that signals integrated use woven into the working routine, not occasional check-ins. Many employees set the intranet as their browser’s default home page
- 533+ active users in the HR vertical site alone in the first month — a meaningful number for an area designed for specific rather than general daily use
Even editors without administrative permissions found their footing immediately, publishing new content from day one with no friction. This is a meaningful signal that the logical structure built together with the client was genuinely intuitive, not merely visually polished.
The most significant feedback came from people. The CEO visited the platform a few days before launch and immediately began thinking about future developments. The internal communications team received a company award for productivity. A project born under pressure became a quiet point of pride.
You can explore how we track adoption with intranet analytics and how we structure company departments across multi-site environments.
What comes next?
The roadmap unfolds across three phases:
- Phase 1 (complete): hub platform + subsites + HR vertical + content migration
- Phase 2: content enrichment and rollout of departmental features across company departments
- Phase 3: engagement — advanced search capabilities, mobile app for field workers away from a desk
The goal is for the platform to keep growing alongside the organization, as new companies join the group: a global intranet conceived as living infrastructure, not a one-off build.
Even under the tightest deadlines, an architecture designed for the future lets an intranet grow with its organization — without starting over at every new challenge.
Is your company going through a merger or restructuring and needs to unify its digital platforms? Book a demo and discover how intranet.ai can support your organization’s growth.