Gordons Partnership LLP
G.Net staff intranet
A bespoke intranet for a law firm, replacing a WordPress site nobody looked at and a sprawl of shared spreadsheets. Twenty-nine areas, single sign-on against the firm's own Microsoft accounts, and a staff list that maintains itself.
the brief
Gordons Partnership ran on shared drives, spreadsheets and inboxes. Finding the billing sheet meant knowing who had sent you the link to it, and the phone list was a document somebody updated when they remembered.
They had an intranet already. It had stopped being the place anyone looked. What they wanted was one address that knew who you were, showed you the things that applied to you, and did not ask for a second password to get into.
It also had to be something a small team could keep running for years, which ruled out anything carrying a framework upgrade path behind it.
what was built
- Sign in with the Microsoft account staff already have. No second password, and no account to create when somebody joins.
- The staff list comes from the firm's own Entra group overnight, with job titles, offices, extensions and photographs. Leavers drop off it without anybody doing anything.
- A directory that also carries designated roles, so finding the nearest fire marshal or first aider is a search rather than a poster in the corridor.
- A telephone directory fed from the phone system, which commits only the matches it is certain of and puts the rest in front of a person.
- A document library with folders, categories and full-text search, and entries that can point at SharePoint where the file already lives.
- Compliance documents that have to be read and acknowledged, tracked per person, with reminders for the ones still outstanding.
- Health and safety in one place: fire marshals, first aiders, defibrillator locations, assembly points and the procedure itself.
- An employee ownership area with the council listing, foldered minutes, and a confidential suggestion box that lands in its own triage inbox.
- Firm news, announcements, monthly updates that require an acknowledgement, and a kudos wall.
- Requests that actually go somewhere: mailbox access routed to the mailbox owner, then a partner, then IT. New starter setup. Laptop pool bookings that chase themselves when they run late.
- Partners approve file openings from the intranet instead of signing into the forms system to do it.
- A knowledge base for the firm's own how-to, and a separate help centre for the application itself, which shipped with sixty-one articles already written.
- Twenty-nine areas, each one switchable, so the firm turns things on when it is ready for them rather than all at once.
- A dashboard each person arranges themselves, a search that covers twelve parts of the site at once, and four permission levels with thirty-seven individual permissions behind them, so somebody can run one thing without being made an administrator.
outcome
One address, and it knows who you are. Nobody maintains a second copy of the staff list, the phone list or the leavers list, because all three come out of the firm's own directory overnight.
The boardroom calendars used to be fetched one after another while the page waited, which took eight to ten seconds and sometimes longer than the browser was prepared to wait. They are warmed in the background now and are simply there.
The old intranet was not switched off so much as demoted. It still runs the forms engine behind the scenes, and its news archive was imported across.
- client
- Gordons Partnership LLP
- sector
- Legal
- disciplines
- web development, database design, single sign-on
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