Ukrtelecom is one of Ukraine's largest national telecom operators: roughly 33 regional branches and more than 24,000 employees spread across the entire country. We delivered an enterprise corporate portal — a single space for internal communications, task management and a knowledge base, engineered for 4,000+ concurrent users and built on a fault-tolerant clustered architecture.
The client and the task
Ukrtelecom serves subscribers in every region of the country, which means its workforce is just as geographically dispersed — from the head office down to district units. Managing a workforce like this is hard not because of its size alone, but because of fragmented information: HR data, time tracking and the org structure lived in separate systems, while corporate knowledge sat in individual mailboxes and local files.
The company set out to modernise internal communications and information management: to unify scattered data, give every employee a single entry point, and make business processes transparent and manageable. The core requirement was that all of it had to stay stable with thousands of users present at once.
The challenge of scale
Thousands of people at once
From day one the portal had to withstand 4,000 concurrent sessions without any drop in speed. This is not a brochure site but a working tool that day-to-day operations depend on, so any downtime is felt instantly by thousands of people.
Scattered sources of truth
Employee records, photos, attendance and the structure of units came from different systems. To keep the portal from becoming yet another isolated database, it had to integrate with the existing sources and pull current data from them, rather than making people re-enter the same thing twice.
How we approached the project
We ran the project in sequential stages, keeping two priorities at the centre — fault tolerance and integration with the company's real data:
- Analysis and design. We modelled internal processes, roles and data flows, and agreed on use cases and availability requirements.
- Clustered architecture. We designed a fault-tolerant infrastructure with horizontal scaling, able to serve thousands of simultaneous users.
- Centralised authentication. We connected LDAP for single sign-on and automatic import of employee photos.
- Accounting data integration. We set up an exchange with the Parus accounting system to pull attendance data without manual entry.
- Synchronisation service. We built a journal-based mechanism that transfers only changed and new records, saving resources.
- Portal modules. We implemented tasks, a knowledge base, training, motivation and corporate communications.
- Testing and launch. We ran more than 100 acceptance-test scenarios and moved the portal into production.
What we built
The portal brought the company's internal life together in one place — from daily tasks to corporate culture:
Task management
Assigning tasks with owners, deadlines and time tracking of the effort spent.
Knowledge base
A single document store with controlled publishing and approval.
Training and motivation
Staff development modules and recognition of employee achievements.
Corporate communications
Internal PR, news and tools for corporate culture.
A separate part of the system is real-time business-process notifications — an employee learns about an event that concerns them immediately, not at the end of the day.
Motivation that moved engagement
After the employee recognition and reward modules went live, the team recorded a measurable rise in average session time — people began spending more time on the portal and using its features more actively.
Architecture and technology
The portal runs on a clustered, fault-tolerant infrastructure. Several web servers on nginx and Apache with Memcached caching, session storage in Redis, master-master replication of MySQL via Percona and Galera, HAProxy load balancing and NAS storage over NFS in master-slave mode. The system keeps full read and write capability as long as at least two servers stay operational.
Authentication is handled by LDAP, which also supplies employee photos. Attendance data comes from the Parus accounting system, and a custom journal-based synchronisation service transfers only changed and new records, using resources sparingly. Traffic is encrypted and protected by a firewall, and the audit log meets ISO requirements while handling more than 1,000,000 events per day.
| Aspect | Before the portal | After rollout |
|---|---|---|
| Internal communications | Email and local files | A single corporate portal |
| HR data and photos | Separate systems, manual entry | Automatic import via LDAP |
| Attendance data | Standalone bookkeeping | Integration with the Parus system |
| Data synchronisation | Full reload | Only changed and new records |
| Availability | A single node as a point of failure | A cluster, at least 2 servers running |
Results
- the portal serves 4,000 concurrent users;
- HR data, attendance and the unit structure are consolidated into a single space;
- resource-efficient synchronisation services move only what has actually changed;
- the audit log records more than 1,000,000 events per day in line with ISO requirements;
- average user session time grew after the motivation modules went live.
The project was accompanied by more than 200 pages of technical and user documentation and over 100 acceptance-test scenarios. The core work was carried out by an ANIART team of four in roughly eight months.
If your company needs a corporate portal that withstands thousands of users and unifies scattered systems into a single space, this same team is ready to build it for you. Explore our other projects or get in touch to discuss yours.
