Case Study: CI Financial - Intranet Portal

Role

Front End Developer at Digital On Six, 2022 - 2026

Technologies

AEM, React, Material UI, Bootstrap

The challenge

As a well-established and global provider of wealth management services through several mergers and acquisitions, CI Financial required a custom internal portal designed to survive ongoing organizational growth. The portal needed to serve teams across the US and Canada while providing secure document management, centralized resource sharing, personalized dashboards, and a company-wide employee directory with advanced filtering. The solution also needed to remain scalable and straightforward for content authors to maintain as new regions, departments, and use cases were introduced.

My role

Led the development and ongoing maintenance of reusable AEM components and page templates, with an emphasis on scalability, authoring flexibility, and adherence to brand guidelines. Co-led the creation of comprehensive technical documentation covering component usage, authoring workflows, and implementation patterns.

Building the new experience

Since this was a greenfield project and required near-real-time UI updates in several areas, we initially favored a lightweight, primarily React-based frontend to accelerate early development. As the portal expanded, the need for enterprise content management, authoring flexibility, and centralized content governance increased. The architecture therefore evolved toward a more AEM-centric hybrid model, allowing us to retain the benefits of React where appropriate while taking advantage of AEM's content management and authoring capabilities.

  • 500+ user profiles created
  • 12+ reusable components and templates developed for content authors

To protect potentially sensitive information, we implemented secure document management and resource sharing through role-based access controls. Content visibility permissions were managed within AEM, while user accounts administration remained with the client.

Documents list component usage
Users were able to securely upload, download, share, tag, and search for documents
Documents list component on a mobile device
On the go: A robust solution design made for ease of use, regardless of device type
Centralized resources example
Through the assignment of role-based access controls, authors were able to comfortably publish content knowing only those with matching permissions would see the appropriate resources

Outcome

Built with scalability and long-term maintainability in mind, the portal enabled secure document management and resource sharing, gave staff a fast and convenient way to find colleagues through multifaceted employee directory search capabilities, and centralized resources for keeping up with services offered across the organization.

What began as a secure document-sharing hub with a small number of core pages evolved into a central digital communications platform used across the organization, eventually supporting dozens of specialized areas and disciplines. The architecture's ability to evolve alongside those requirements allowed the portal to grow substantially beyond its original scope while remaining maintainable and flexible for content authors.

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