The First Intranet of a Logistics Company: Centralising Everything Without Losing Team Spirit
An Italian logistics company with offices in four European countries built its first company intranet in two months: a unified hub to centralise communications and documents, dedicated department sites, and a protected document area with download restrictions — starting from scratch, because nothing had existed before.
3 Key Project Figures
- Around 300 employees involved in the project
- 4 countries covered: Italy, Germany, Slovakia and Poland
- 2 months from kickoff to go-live, Christmas holidays included
Introduction
Not every intranet is built to replace something. Some are built to exist for the first time. That is the case for an Italian logistics company specialising in freight transport between Lombardy and Veneto, with branch offices in Germany, Slovakia and Poland and around 300 employees. Until recently, this company had never had a company intranet: information lived scattered across departments, each with its own management approach, its own archives, its own communication channels.
What makes this case particularly interesting is not only the complete absence of a similar tool in the past, but also the cultural context in which it emerged. This is a young-spirited company with a strong commitment to internal training and a surprisingly rich range of engagement initiatives — video channels, social communities, even staff football matches. Unusually, the project was not led by the HR department, as happens in most cases, but by the marketing and communications team: a clear signal that the goal was as much about relationships as it was about organisation.
What the Team Worked On
The project involved four main areas:
- A unified hub site to centralise communications and resources from all departments
- Dedicated vertical sites for departments with higher content volumes (IT, HR, Quality)
- A protected document area with reinforced permissions and download restrictions
- Intranet engagement components to foster a sense of belonging across the company
The Challenge: Scattered Information, No Common Reference Point
The main reason that led this company to contact intranet.ai is one of the most common — but no less urgent for that: too much confusion when trying to find information. The different business functions — IT, HR and Quality — each operated according to their own logic, often without a shared channel to bring content together into a single space accessible to everyone.
The objective stated from the very first meeting was clear: break down these departmental silos and consolidate everything onto a single platform, while maintaining — where the volume of content made it necessary — dedicated department sites for the functions that truly needed them.
Since this was the first company intranet, the challenge was not only technical. The people who would need to feed the platform with content had never managed anything like it before: translating everyday working life into organised digital content is not straightforward when you have never done it. In the early weeks the project struggled to gain momentum, with the main point of contact often left alone to chase contributions from colleagues across departments that were slow to arrive. Only as the deadline drew closer did the pace of work shift dramatically — enough that the intranet.ai team brought in additional resources to ensure the launch date would be met.
Not all the challenges were organisational. Some were genuinely technical, and unpredictable until they appeared. The client needed certain sensitive documents — HR policies, compliance data, quality documentation — to be non-downloadable by users, even those with viewing permissions. Removing the download icon from a web part is not sufficient, because SharePoint retains a native download button when a document is opened: the solution required building a dedicated vertical site with reinforced permissions, developed in close coordination with the client’s internal infrastructure security teams.
Our Solution: A Solid Foundation Built to Grow
The answer to this centralisation requirement was the creation of a main hub site, designed to bring together all communications and resources regardless of which department produced them. Departments with a higher volume of content — IT, HR and Quality — received their own dedicated department sites, but everything published in those sites is automatically inherited and surfaced on the home page as well, so no content stays isolated in a corner only reachable by those who already know where to look.
For documents requiring stronger protection than standard access controls, a dedicated vertical site was built with permissions independent of those inherited from the rest of the platform — a controlled-access area where HR policies, compliance data, quality documentation and the org chart are visible but not downloadable. Document management was therefore structured across two distinct levels: standard access and protected access with download restrictions.
On the engagement side, the project needed to balance two opposing forces. On one hand, the company wanted to strengthen its sense of belonging — with a new-employee widget on the home page and a digital bulletin board for internal communications. On the other, a cautious internal sensitivity around privacy guided choices that differed from the original plan: the personal profile component was removed at the client’s request during the final review phase, and the engagement board was given a content approval system to prevent unmoderated user publications.
One distinctive element concerns language. Because the company has offices across multiple European countries, the site was configured with English as the base language — a necessary technical choice, since the primary language of a SharePoint site cannot be changed once the site has been created. The internal communications are delivered entirely in Italian for now, with a planned future move towards a multi-language intranet that will make content accessible to the international offices as well.
Results: A Solid Base, Ready to Scale
The project went live in mid-February, approximately two months after the December kickoff — accounting for the Christmas holidays that inevitably slowed the initial pace. It was not a linear journey, with departmental contributions arriving in waves and a significant acceleration only in the final weeks, but the end result is a robust platform covering all the foundational needs of a company that had never had anything like it before: company documents organised by category, operational applications, a unified stream of company communications, and the first engagement elements for colleagues.
Without a structured support contract in place, detailed usage reports are not available. But qualitative signals tell a clear story. Editors with no advanced technical skills found their way around content publishing quickly. Operational shortcut buttons on the home page — such as quick access to the org chart — were among the most appreciated features. And months after launch, the client reached out again to the team with a support request: evidence that the platform remains an active point of reference even without a dedicated contract.
What Comes Next?
The multi-language project remains the most natural next step, given the presence of offices in Germany, Slovakia and Poland that currently have no access to an intranet in their own language. The intranet.ai team is ready to support this evolution whenever the company decides to prioritise it, alongside any further development of the intranet engagement features — an area that, given the many existing initiatives the company already runs to bring colleagues together outside work, still has significant room to grow within the platform itself.
Even a first logistics intranet, built with an essential package, can become a solid foundation for growing internal communications over time — as long as the structure is designed from day one to support that growth.
Are you planning to build your company’s first intranet and want to start on solid ground? Book a demo and find out how intranet.ai can support you from day one.