From a Critical Security Breach to a New Global Intranet in One Week
An international luxury group migrated its multi-language global intranet from a compromised on-premise environment to SharePoint Online in seven days — turning a security emergency into the foundation for a stronger, more modern platform.
3 key project figures
- 1 week from the urgent request to the new global intranet going live
- 190 historical news articles migrated manually with the original publication dates preserved
- Around 10 intranet sites now managed globally across the group’s different countries
Introduction
Some projects are born from a carefully planned strategic decision. Others start with an urgent call on a Friday afternoon because something has broken and a solution is needed within days. That is what happened to an international luxury group — a long-standing intranet.ai customer for intranet projects across several countries — that suddenly found itself having to abandon the on-premise environment underpinning its global internal communication platform.
A series of changes to the internal infrastructure had created serious security vulnerabilities on the existing platform, rendering it effectively unusable. There was no time for a tender process, a prolonged analysis phase, or a project planned over several months. The only priority was to rescue, as quickly as possible, a tool that thousands of people around the world relied on every day to work, communicate, and access company resources.
What the team worked on
- Urgent migration in one week — global intranet live on SharePoint Online from day zero
- Historical content restoration — 190 news articles migrated manually with original chronology preserved
- People directory with tiered visibility — differentiated information display based on whether the viewer is a manager or a standard employee
- Multi-year technical partnership — fast response enabled by deep prior knowledge of the client’s Microsoft environment
The problem: a global platform to rescue, with no time to spare
The group’s internal portal — the one all employees use daily to access communications, tools, and resources regardless of country or function — was built on an on-premise environment. When the infrastructure changes triggered the security issues, the request that arrived at the end of July was as simple as it was drastic: find a new home for this platform, immediately.
The objective was not purely technical. Migrating to a modern SharePoint Online environment meant ensuring a complete transfer of all content from the previous platform, while also preserving existing assets and enabling more modern features, a smoother user experience, and more effective collaboration tools. The group did not want to lose anything it had built over the years — but it also wanted to come out of this emergency with something better than what it had before.
The time pressure made every decision more critical. This was not a small company site but the daily access point for a large population of employees distributed across multiple countries, each with its own functions, tools, and communications to preserve.
What made such a rapid response possible was the team’s prior knowledge of the client’s environment. The vendor that handled the emergency was already an established technical partner of the group, having previously built intranet platforms for specific countries including the UK and Spain. This familiarity with the client’s Microsoft environment made all the difference when deciding who to entrust with an intervention as urgent as it was sensitive — there was no time to brief a new vendor on how the group’s technology environment was structured.
Our solution: rescue first, enrich later
The project was organized into distinct phases, each with a clear and realistic objective given the time available. The first phase — the genuine emergency — took a single week. In those seven days, a first working version of the intranet was built on SharePoint Online: navigation structure, homepage, communication components, the list of the main company applications employees use daily, and the internal people directory — all created together and published with the correct permissions from day one. A result that meant the group never went a single day without its essential working tool.
Once the emergency was resolved, a second phase began — longer and more complex — dedicated to recovering and rebuilding everything that had existed on the old platform. A thorough analysis of the previous site was conducted, followed by a step-by-step reconstruction of the navigation menu and department areas, giving users a more modern and refined experience than what they had before.
A significant part of this work involved migrating historical communications. This was not simply a matter of moving documents, but of recovering two years of company communications — announcements and news published during 2024 and 2025 — while keeping the original publication dates intact so as not to disrupt users’ perceived chronology. The work was painstaking and methodical, made even more complex by the fact that on the old platform communications had been published with a social-group-like logic, not always with an associated image or a clear link to a reference document.
In parallel, the team worked on improving the company org chart, developing a dedicated tool integrated with the group’s HR information systems, and extending the internal directory by introducing tiered information visibility based on the viewing user’s profile. Managers see additional and more sensitive information about their colleagues, while standard users continue to see only basic details such as department and role.
The client relationship during this phase was built around a consistent weekly rhythm, with regular meetings in which the intranet.ai team presented progress on content pages while a second team dedicated to technical development showed advances on the org chart and the extended directory. A dedicated news site was also created, designed to be managed independently by the client’s communications team, with pre-built templates to speed up publishing — alongside dedicated training sessions covering both content publishing and autonomous updates of the platform’s main components.
The results: from a critical failure to a stronger platform
The project, which entered its reconstruction phase in mid-September, concluded at the end of February with the launch of a second version of the homepage — this time designed for a richer, more refined daily experience compared to the first release, which had been built purely for the emergency. During this period, 190 historical news articles were manually recovered and migrated with their original publication order preserved: work that demanded precision and careful attention to detail given the non-standardized nature of the original content.
The fact that the group chose to continue working with intranet.ai through this more complex phase — after the emergency intervention in the first week — reflects the strength of the partnership. A relationship rooted in years of technical collaboration, during which intranet.ai had built platforms for multiple countries within the group. That accumulated knowledge made it possible to act quickly precisely because a deep understanding of the client’s Microsoft environment already existed.
Today the group manages around ten distinct intranet sites across its various countries and business functions — a clear sign of how central the platform has become to the organization’s daily digital infrastructure, well beyond the scope of the emergency project that first brought it onto SharePoint Online.
What comes next?
The group subsequently chose to move to intranet.ai’s Diamond plan — a step that brought advanced analytics tools, an intelligent platform management assistant, and a document management system, alongside a mobile application, a document and communication read-confirmation system, and intelligent search. A natural evolution, arriving after the platform’s foundations had been consolidated through the emergency and reconstruction phases.
A more recent initiative is also underway, developed in collaboration with an external agency chosen by the client for a further visual harmonization of the portal. intranet.ai’s role in this phase remains that of the primary technical partner for everything SharePoint — ensuring that any future design changes remain structurally and technically sound, while leaving room for more distinctive visual solutions than what SharePoint offers natively.
When an emergency forces a migration in just a few days, the real challenge comes after: turning a rescue solution into a platform capable of lasting and growing for years.
Do you need to migrate your intranet quickly to a more secure and modern environment? Book a demo and discover how intranet.ai can step in even in the most urgent situations.