Intranet Development for an International 5,000-Employee Oil and Gas Company

Summary

An international oil and gas drilling company grew to more than 5,000 employees across 30 offices but still had no centralized way to manage documents or collaborate, which slowed cross-departmental work. INNERLUXES built a corporate SharePoint intranet that became a single access point for documents, projects, and corporate information — structuring scattered files, connecting distributed teams, and lifting general productivity across the organization.

About the Client

The Client provides exploration and production drilling of oil and gas wells, directional drilling, sidetracking, well cementation, and mud elaboration and support. Its customers are established international oil and gas producers, and its combination of high-tech equipment, advanced technologies, and qualified personnel lets it deliver fast, efficient services to customers around the world.

Rapid Growth to 5,000 Employees Outpaced the Company's Document and Collaboration Tools

The Client began production in 2000 with a single branch and expanded quickly across seven regions, reaching more than one million miles of exploration and production drilling and over 3,000 well overhauls a year. As the business grew, staff numbers rose to more than 5,000 employees spread across 30 distributed offices.

At that scale, the company was still operating without any centralized document management or collaboration solution, which hurt overall productivity — especially in cross-departmental interaction. To create a unified corporate portal, improve internal communication, and bring together employees from different offices and departments, the Client engaged INNERLUXES.

A Corporate SharePoint Intranet Connecting 30 Offices Across Seven Regions

After analyzing the Client's corporate structure and existing approach to project management, INNERLUXES recommended a corporate SharePoint intranet as the optimal platform for the Client's needs. The intranet brought together:

• Corporate document management. All current documents were imported, attributed with content types, and arranged in libraries to form a logical, easy-to-use file store, with custom workflows to streamline document processing.
• Project management. Dedicated workspaces for each project team and department let project managers run an entire project in one place — storing documentation, sharing files instantly, discussing issues in real time, and distributing personal tasks through the project cycle.
• Departmental management. Department sites let teams manage their own activities without mixing them with others; each site is accessible only to users from that department.
• Enterprise search. INNERLUXES customized SharePoint's enterprise search so employees can quickly find data and documents across the libraries using metadata-based criteria and taxonomic terms for precise results.
• Technical reference. Given the industrial nature of the business, the many paper standards and regulations were digitized into a dedicated reference database so teams can reach the documents they need at any project stage.
• Forums, polls, and surveys. Microblogs, polls, and discussion forums encourage internal communication and team spirit, and a dedicated survey system lets HR gauge employee satisfaction and engagement.
• Corporate portal and content management system. A central hub displays company news, announcements, events, organizational charts, and policies, with a user-friendly CMS for adding, editing, and removing content, designed in line with the Client's corporate style.

After the portal components were launched, INNERLUXES moved into a support stage to handle change requests and further development, adding a corporate calendar, informers, social tools (wiki pages and a corporate chat), and personal and team sites.

A Single Access Point That Lifted Productivity Across the Organization

• Scattered documentation was structured and employees gained a single access point to corporate information through a reliable project- and content-management system.
• Centralizing major working processes raised general productivity, improved communication with end clients, and sped up the project cycle.
• Information management became more efficient, internal communication improved, and corporate culture was adopted more widely across the whole organization.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft SharePoint Server, jQuery, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, WSP Builder, VSTO.