Enterprise Portal Development for a Financial Advisory Firm

Summary

A US financial advisory firm struggled with inefficient internal collaboration: no centralized project and task management, little operational transparency, and no online access to its content management system or knowledge base. INNERLUXES built an enterprise business portal on SharePoint Online with enterprise search, content management, Office 365 integration, department workspaces, a wiki knowledge base, and permission-based access. The portal gave the firm a single digital space for collaboration and communication while keeping sensitive documents centralized and compliant with internal regulatory requirements.

About the Client

The Client is a US-based financial advisory firm that has 800 million US dollars in assets.

Fragmented Collaboration Was Slowing the Firm Down

The Client's main challenge was inefficient internal collaboration, caused by the lack of centralized project and task management and insufficient transparency of business operations. Employees had no online access to the corporate content management system or a knowledge base, and they spent a great deal of time on simple repetitive tasks, which impaired their performance. The Client needed a consistent system for employee communication, collaboration, and sharing work-related information across the firm — and it had to support enterprise-level security and regulatory compliance.

An Enterprise Portal on SharePoint Online With Role-Based Access

After analyzing the Client's business needs, INNERLUXES's SharePoint experts recommended an enterprise business portal in SharePoint Online and turned those needs into solution requirements. The portal's core functionality covers enterprise search and content management for image, audio, and video files, including automatic metadata extraction for images. To strengthen collaboration and performance, the team integrated the portal with Office 365 tools such as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner. For security and regulatory compliance, access to content is permission-based, with users divided into three groups:

• Viewers — read-only access to pages, list items, documents, and files.
• Contributors — viewing, updating, and deleting list items, documents, and files.
• Supervisors — creating list items, documents, and files; accepting and rejecting content uploads; and creating, editing, and deleting news and announcements on the banner.

The portal is organized into four main sections:

• Home Page — a calendar of upcoming corporate events; a News & Announcements banner slider of up to five recent items, each with a picture, title, brief description, and details link; action buttons for employee recognition (Recognize a Teammate) and ordering supplies (Request Supplies, which opens a popup that sends the request to an office administrator); and a Compliance tile linking to storage for training, safety, and disaster-recovery documents.
• Teams — separate pages for the Administration, Accounting, Investment, and Tax & Financial Planning departments, each tailored to that team's needs; for example, the Administration page holds client documents, marketing documents, and quarterly reports, while the Accounting page holds accounts receivable, payroll and benefits, and audit records.
• Knowledge base — an enterprise wiki for creating, editing, deleting, and linking wiki pages, uploading documents and files, filtering pages by author, editor, or date, and letting users like and comment on pages.
• Contacts — a directory of all employees with their personal and contact information, filterable by criteria such as name, job title, or location, and able to send direct emails with attached files.

A Single, Compliant Space for Collaboration

• The Client gained a digital space for team collaboration, project and task management, and internal communication.
• Employees can search for and access the documents they need for their work quickly and easily.
• Staff stay aware of all company news and events, which has increased employee engagement.
• Access restrictions and centralized storage of sensitive documents help the firm remain compliant with its internal regulatory requirements.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, .NET Core, SharePoint Framework.