An Italian industrial automation company built a secure SharePoint client portal — a fully functional extranet — inside its existing Microsoft 365 environment, giving each customer a separate, branded space for technical documents while keeping all data isolated and controlled.
3 key project metrics
- ~10 client portal areas already live, with a scalable structure ready to grow
- 2 months total implementation time, covering both intranet and client extranet
- 10-year document retention requirement for each client area
Introduction
Not every company that reaches out to intranet.ai is looking for an intranet first. Some have a need that faces outward — and the intranet ends up being a by-product of the main project. That’s exactly what happened with an Italian company specialising in industrial automation: they design machines and software for automating their clients’ production processes.
What they actually needed wasn’t an employee platform. It was a secure digital space where they could share technical documentation, certifications, and materials with each of their end clients — while keeping every client’s data completely separate from everyone else’s.
The challenge: sharing technical documents without mixing up clients
Every machine this company ships comes with a significant volume of documentation: software manuals, electrical schematics, certifications, signed contracts, technical drawings. This material needs to be exchanged with each client in an organised, secure, and durable way — often to meet technical and legal obligations requiring documents to be retained for a decade or more.
Before this project, the company had no proper tool for managing this exchange. Their old intranet was effectively a public-facing site built on a generic CMS — more of an information display than a real working tool. The real problem wasn’t internal use: it was giving clients organised, restricted access to the technical materials tied to each machine they had purchased.
The trickiest part wasn’t technical in the narrow sense — it was permissions management. No client should ever see another client’s content, and each dedicated client area had to feel purpose-built for that specific relationship, not like a generic shared module.
The solution: a SharePoint extranet built inside the intranet
The approach is straightforward but highly effective: because all of this company’s clients already have corporate accounts in the supplier’s Microsoft domain, it was possible to build what functions in every practical sense as a SharePoint extranet — while technically remaining a restricted area within the same corporate intranet. This dramatically simplifies permissions management compared to running a fully separate external platform.
When a client logs in, they see a welcome page with links to the company’s social channels, general news and documents, useful links, and corporate video content. The real heart of the system, though, is their own personal client area, reachable via a dedicated homepage button or the side menu.
Inside that area, each client has two dedicated folders: one where the company uploads documents to share — electrical schematics, certifications, machine-specific technical files — and one where the client can upload materials back to the supplier, such as a signed contract. The document management flow is structured, bidirectional, and fully traceable.
Every client area is customised with the client’s own logo, reinforcing the perception of a tailored service rather than a generic shared space. Around ten areas have been configured so far, with more expected as client adoption grows.
Alongside the client portal, the project also delivered an internal intranet — deliberately lean. The brief called for migrating the old site essentially as-is, simply reorganising the existing menu and content into a more sensible structure, without adding visual embellishments or sophisticated features. This was a deliberate choice for the audience: most employees are engineers, developers, and maintenance technicians who value a practical, no-frills tool. Utilities, company documents, news, and a business calendar — all organised simply and efficiently.
Results: fast, practical, and already scalable
The project stood out for its speed and concreteness. Once the client portal logic was defined together with the customer, it was implemented quickly — precisely because the pattern proved easy to replicate for each new client area.
Total implementation time came in at roughly two months, with a one-to-two-week overrun due to summer scheduling complexity between teams. Still well within the expectations of a project designed to be simple and direct from the start.
The ten or so client areas already live are just the beginning. The architecture is designed to accommodate a much larger number without structural changes — each new area simply replicates the established pattern. Over time, the company will be able to configure new client areas independently, progressively reducing the need for external support on that specific task. Monitoring adoption across all areas is straightforward thanks to built-in intranet analytics.
What’s next?
One of the most original developments in the pipeline is an integration between the internal people directory and the badge-reading system already in use at the company. The idea is to show, directly on each person’s directory entry, whether a colleague is actually on-site at any given moment — fed by a periodic data file from the attendance system. A highly practical feature for a workforce made up largely of technicians who move constantly between offices and production areas.
The other open topic is document migration. A significant portion of the technical files tied to individual client machines still lives in individual employees’ personal cloud storage, including large software files. Moving this material into the new structured environment is the logical next step — consolidating the company’s entire document archive into a single, secure, searchable system.
There is also a governance dimension worth highlighting. Managing the end-client data required signing a dedicated confidentiality agreement, because the list of companies served by this industrial automation firm is commercially sensitive information in its own right. Even in a project that looks simple and pragmatic on the surface, the trust dimension between the parties remains central.
When a company’s real priority is communicating with its clients — not just its employees — the SharePoint intranet can become the foundation for a full client extranet, without needing a separate digital environment.
Need to share documents securely and in an organised way with your clients, without leaving Microsoft 365? Book a demo and discover how intranet.ai can help you build your SharePoint client portal.