The modernization of an outdated employee communication network

On how we rebuilt and extended a digital employee workspace.

In 2021, our company was approached to modernize an outdated communication network.

Our client is a leading engagement technology provider that powers colleague engagement and experience. The client’s main product was obsolete and lacked essential functionality, which hindered overall productivity.

By using domain-specific expertise, our team successfully modernized the employee communication network. The transformed, including on-demand, necessary functionality, and easy-to-maintain enterprise-level software is being actively utilized by both the client and their numerous customers all over the globe.

Multi-tenancy explained

Multi-tenant solutions are applications that allow multiple organizations to share common infrastructure. Multi-tenant solutions are implemented to enable individual users to use common software while keeping their data and settings isolated from other users.

Some examples:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Human Resource Management (HRM)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Project Management Systems
• Document Management Systems

The objectives of the telecommunications project

Until the prospective partnership, the provided legacy product was obsolete and lacked essential functionality. What’s more, the said legacy product had problems with maintenance.

Our company was approached to cover:

• Business consulting
• Product migration
• Functionality extension
• Front-end redesign

The contribution of our engineering team

Business consulting

At the first stage of the complex project, we covered business consulting — our team has evaluated the solution to identify the most suitable strategy.

Product migration

As the coding style of the legacy software was old-fashioned, the client was facing big issues with maintenance — our team has rewritten major parts from PHP to Laravel, a framework with elegant, simple syntax, to improve user authentication and authorization, and eliminate potential vulnerabilities.

Functionality extension

To make the platform more attractive and easy-to-navigate, we improved existing features and implemented additional functionality — contacts, threads, posting, chats, and more.

Front-end redesign

To provide better scalability, the functioning of extensions, and performance, we migrated individual parts from JS and JQuery to React.

The solution

The network we delivered is a multi-tenant platform that optimizes colleague engagement and experience. After registration, all employees get access to completely individual sub-platforms.

The software we designed is a user-friendly platform, which provides trouble-free scaling and personalization. Our system increases productivity, enables analytics, improves support, and drives greater revenue.

The client was providing:

• Q&A forms
• Limited posting

Our engineers successfully implemented:

• Network contacts
• Group threads
• Social posting including likes and comments, sharing, following, pinned posts, and notifications
• Secure and private chats
• Employee awards
• Third-party integrations
• Single log-in
• AR support
• Role-based access to certain workspace features
• Advanced analytics for tracking employee engagement

The challenges and outcomes

The challenges we faced:

• Platform refactoring

Considering defined technical requirements to maintain existing structure, the refactoring required accuracy. By leveraging field knowledge and experience and performing manual testing, with the right tools and strategy, we performed the refactoring with accuracy, so that the structure remained untouched.

• Functionality extension

The validation of the business logic behind the additional functionality required significant resource allocation. By maintaining regular communication, we improved existing features and implemented essential functionality to make the product feel like social media.

Having applied extensive expertise in delivering custom-made solutions for the telecommunications industry, we have successfully resolved every challenge to provide utmost value.

The solution we delivered:

• Accelerates support, issue investigation, and debugging

Before cooperation, issue identification and debugging could take several days, which affected overall efficacy. To date, with built-in, instant alerts, these processes take just 24 hours.

• Increases engagement

With threads, social posting, secure and private chats, and more, the employees are way more comfortable. This means they enjoy better communication and collaboration, which significantly increases engagement.

• Provides analytics
• Increases profit

By migrating and extending the outdated intranet solution, our client notably increased its competitiveness. This way, the company attracts more potential customers.

In brief, by delegating the complex engineering project to trusted, experienced offshore software developers, the client has streamlined overall productivity and revenue.

Summing up

For leaders across industries, the implementation and modernization of employee communication networks can provide multiple benefits — improved troubleshooting, better engagement, seamless analytics, and more. Whether intranet, internal newsletters, satisfaction surveys, social advocacy, instant messaging, or other popular tools — making employees more comfortable in their work environment is essential.

But there are also other solutions that can drive productivity:

• Project management software
• Time tracking software
• Accounting and financial solutions
• Sales and marketing tools
• AI-driven business process automation
• AI-driven chatbots

And more!