A modern TAQANET for every TAQA employee.
An interactive walkthrough of the SharePoint Online intranet Silwatech has designed for TAQA under RFQ HQ-200155. It moves through the solution, the architecture, security, and the delivery plan in the order your engineering and communications teams review them, with the working prototype one click away.
A group operating at national scale, and the intranet behind it.
TAQANET is the digital front door for the people who run one of the region’s most important energy businesses. This engagement replaces its SharePoint 2019 foundation with SharePoint Online, and this walkthrough shows exactly how.
TAQA generates power, desalinates water, and moves both across transmission and distribution networks that serve millions of people, with operations spanning the UAE and markets across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The brief, in plain terms
- Move TAQANET from SharePoint 2019 on-premises to SharePoint Online, fully cloud, no on-premises dependencies.
- Build with out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities first, TAQA’s stated preference, so the platform stays upgrade-safe.
- Serve ~400 HQ employees at go-live on an architecture that extends to the wider TAQA Group without redesign.
- Migrate HQ content with validation and legacy URL redirects, so bookmarks and muscle memory survive the move.
- Meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and keep all data inside Microsoft’s UAE cloud regions.
Engineering partner for government and enterprise across the Gulf.
Silwatech is a technology consulting and digital engineering company with delivery across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the wider GCC, Europe, and Africa. Its Microsoft practice covers Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure, alongside enterprise software development and AI engineering.
Portfolio reflects direct engagements and collaboration within partner-led programs.
One intranet, four surfaces, zero new platforms to buy.
TAQANET moves to SharePoint Online inside TAQA’s existing Microsoft 365 tenant. Every experience below is delivered through services TAQA already licenses, configured rather than custom-built, so the platform keeps improving as Microsoft ships updates.
TAQANET Home
The corporate front page: CEO messages, news, announcements, alerts, events, quick links, and key documents, curated by Group Communications.
Department portals
Hub-connected sites for functions, business units, projects, and communities. Each inherits navigation, branding, search, and permissions from the hub.
My TAQANET
A personalized layer that targets content by department, role, and location, and follows each employee across the intranet.
Search & knowledge
Microsoft Search across pages, news, people, and documents, tuned with verticals, promoted results, and metadata refiners.
Ten functional domains, each mapped to the RFQ.
Every module below traces to a requirement in HQ-200155. Select a module to see what it does and which Microsoft 365 capability delivers it.
Home & Communications
The configurable corporate homepage that greets all of HQ: leadership voice at the top, organizational news underneath, and the tools people came for one click away.
Capabilities
- CEO messages, corporate news, and announcements with featured placement
- Alerts and urgent banners for time-critical updates
- Events calendar, quick links, and key documents
- Announcements targeted by department, role, or location attributes
How it’s built
SharePoint communication site with out-of-the-box web parts: News, Hero, Events, Quick Links, and Highlighted Content, arranged with audience targeting.
Publishing & Governance
Structured authoring for a small, accountable publishing group: content moves draft to review to approval to publish, with scheduling and archiving handled by the platform.
Capabilities
- Draft, review, approve, schedule, publish workflow for every page and news post
- Centralized publishing governed by Group Communications, up to five content authors
- Scheduled publishing, featured content rotation, and archiving rules
- Authoring simple enough for non-technical editors, no HTML required
How it’s built
SharePoint page approvals driven by Power Automate flows, with content scheduling and version history native to SharePoint Online.
Search & Discovery
The fix for TAQANET’s weakest link today. One search box that understands pages, people, news, and documents, and puts the official answer first.
Capabilities
- Microsoft Search across sites, pages, news, people, and files
- Search verticals for the content types employees actually look for
- Promoted results and bookmarks for high-intent queries such as payslips or VPN
- Metadata-driven refiners powered by the enterprise taxonomy
How it’s built
Microsoft Search configuration: verticals, result types, bookmarks, and Q&A entries, refined continuously using search analytics.
My TAQANET
The personal layer. Two employees in different departments open the same intranet and see different news, different quick links, and different documents, automatically.
Capabilities
- Content targeted by department, role, location, and profile attributes
- Personal shortcuts: frequently accessed content, followed sites, recent documents
- Department-aware quick links and applications
How it’s built
SharePoint audience targeting bound to Entra ID attributes and Microsoft 365 groups, with Microsoft Graph powering recent and followed content.
Departments & Sites
A hub-and-spoke estate that gives every function its own portal while keeping navigation, branding, and governance consistent across the intranet.
Capabilities
- Department, business unit, project, and community sites under one corporate hub
- Mega menu, breadcrumbs, and categorized navigation across every level
- Departmental autonomy inside enterprise-wide standards
How it’s built
SharePoint hub sites with inherited navigation, theme, search scope, and permission model. Full structure in the Backend Architecture section.
Social & Engagement
The features that turn an intranet from a noticeboard into a workplace: conversation, reaction, and feedback loops between leadership and employees.
Capabilities
- Comments and likes on news and pages
- Discussions, interest groups, and communities
- Polls and surveys for structured feedback
How it’s built
Native SharePoint page reactions and comments, Viva Engage communities for discussion, and Microsoft Forms for polls and surveys.
People Directory
Find a colleague by name, team, or role, then see where they sit in the organization and how to reach them, without asking around.
Capabilities
- People search with profile cards: role, department, contact, presence
- Organizational context: manager, team, and peers
- One-click handoff to Teams chat, call, or email
How it’s built
Microsoft Search people vertical over Entra ID profiles, enriched through Microsoft Graph. Profile quality is validated during discovery.
Documents & Policies
A governed home for the documents people rely on: policies, procedures, forms, and templates, each with an owner, a lifecycle, and consistent metadata.
Capabilities
- Standardized libraries with content types and managed metadata
- Versioning, co-authoring, and controlled key document surfacing
- Lifecycle management for policies, procedures, and corporate documents
How it’s built
SharePoint document libraries with enterprise content types, term store taxonomy, and retention behavior aligned to TAQA’s classification rules.
Analytics & Adoption
Evidence, not anecdotes. Dashboards that show what employees read, search for, and ignore, so Communications can steer content with data.
Capabilities
- Executive dashboards for adoption and engagement
- Page views, content consumption, active and returning users
- Engagement metrics: likes, comments, polls, survey participation
- Search analytics including failed queries, feeding continuous improvement
How it’s built
SharePoint and Microsoft 365 usage analytics, search reports, and curated dashboards for the executive and communications view.
Content Migration
The current HQ intranet arrives in the new TAQANET cleaned, validated, and findable, and old bookmarks keep working where feasible.
Capabilities
- Content inventory and audit with TAQA before anything moves
- HQ pages, news, and libraries migrated with metadata validation
- Migration rehearsal before the production run
- Legacy URL redirect management where feasible
How it’s built
SharePoint Migration Tool and Microsoft Migration Manager, with validation checkpoints and a migration report at completion.
Stop reading. Start clicking.
Silwatech built a working interactive prototype of TAQANET alongside this proposal. It runs in any modern browser, needs nothing installed, and demonstrates every scope commitment with sample data.
TAQANET Interactive Prototype
Persona switching
Four fictional employees. Switch persona and watch Home retarget news, links, and apps live.
English · العربية
Full bilingual publishing preview with right-to-left layout, one click from the top bar.
Search that answers
Search “payslip” or “VPN” and get a promoted result with a working action, not ten stale links.
Publishing Studio
An interactive kanban of the draft, review, approve, schedule, publish lifecycle.
13 working micro-apps
Payslips, leave, expenses, helpdesk, meeting rooms, learning, travel, and more behind every quick link.
Ask TAQANET
A scripted assistant preview showing where Copilot-era answers fit into the intranet.
Adoption analytics
The engagement dashboard Communications would use, with a downloadable report.
URL continuity
A working demo of legacy link redirects, so old bookmarks land on the right new page.
Suggested five-minute path
Cloud-native on Microsoft 365, end to end.
One diagram, the whole system. Employees authenticate through Entra ID and land on SharePoint Online in Microsoft’s UAE regions; every capability around it is a Microsoft 365 service. Select any component for its role in TAQANET.
How a page reaches an employee
Every request is authenticated by Entra ID under Conditional Access and MFA, then served by SharePoint Online from Microsoft’s UAE data centre regions. No component below sits outside Microsoft 365.
- Configure-first: native services before custom code
- No on-premises dependencies anywhere in the design
- Extensible for Phase 2 enterprise integrations
Why it matters: the platform inherits Microsoft’s availability, security, and roadmap, and TAQA’s team operates configuration, not infrastructure.
The experience layer, engineered to stay standard.
TAQANET’s interface is built from SharePoint’s modern experience: the same components Microsoft maintains, themed to TAQA’s brand. Custom code is a last resort with a governance gate, not a starting point.
Configure
Out-of-the-box web parts and settings: News, Hero, Events, Quick Links, Highlighted Content, People, and site navigation.
Compose
Page templates, section layouts, audience targeting, and the TAQA theme applied through supported theming and site designs.
Extend with SPFx
SharePoint Framework web parts or extensions only where a requirement has no native answer, code-reviewed and tenant-safe.
Fork the platform
No unsupported customization, no modified system files, nothing that breaks when Microsoft ships an update.
Brand & theming
TAQA’s colors, typography, and header applied via supported theming, aligned with brand and communication standards during design.
Responsive & mobile
Every page responsive from phone to desktop, plus native reach through the SharePoint app and Viva Connections in Teams.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA as an acceptance criterion: contrast, keyboard paths, focus order, and alt text validated during testing, not assumed.
Bilingual readiness
SharePoint multilingual publishing keeps English and Arabic page variants linked, with right-to-left rendering handled by the platform.
SharePoint Online does the heavy lifting.
There is no application server to build and no database to administer. The backend is SharePoint Online’s content services, organized through a hub-and-spoke estate and automated with Power Automate.
- Leadership
- Vision & values
- Corporate pages
- Per-unit team sites
- Unit news
- HR · Finance · IT
- Policies & services
- Project team sites
- Working documents
- Interest groups
- Viva Engage spaces
Content architecture
Enterprise content types, managed metadata in the term store, naming conventions, and standardized libraries. The taxonomy that makes search and navigation work.
- Hierarchy aligned to TAQA’s organization
- Breadcrumbs and contextual navigation
- Document lifecycle management
Process automation
Power Automate carries the operational load: approval routing, scheduled publishing, notifications, and governance checkpoints, all configuration rather than code.
- Draft to publish approval flows
- Publishing schedules and reminders
- Notification and escalation rules
Data & services
Microsoft Graph supplies people, organization, and activity signals for personalization. Content lives in SharePoint repositories with versioning and audit built in.
- Graph-driven profiles and targeting
- Version history on every artifact
- Activity captured in unified audit logs
Deep in Microsoft 365 now, ready for the enterprise next.
Phase 1 keeps integration inside the Microsoft ecosystem, exactly as the RFQ scopes it. The same integration layer then accepts TAQA’s enterprise systems in Phase 2 without rework.
In scope now
Phase 1TAQANET inside Teams through Viva Connections, news pushed to channels, and person-to-chat handoffs from the people directory.
Single sign-on, profile attributes for personalization, and the group membership that drives audience targeting.
Events surface on the intranet calendar; invitations and mail handoffs open where people already work.
Documents open in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with co-authoring; personal files stay in OneDrive.
SharePoint Migration Tool and Microsoft Migration Manager carry HQ content from SharePoint 2019 with validation checkpoints.
Architecture-ready
Phase 2 · Future scopeEmployee services and HR data surfaced into the intranet through Graph connectors and supported APIs.
Tickets raised and tracked from TAQANET, with status visible where employees look first.
TAQA’s named business systems join the same integration layer as demand matures.
Five layers between the internet and a TAQANET page.
Defence in depth on a Zero Trust footing: every request is verified, every permission is least-privilege, and every action is auditable. Select a layer to see its controls.
Nobody reaches TAQANET anonymously
Microsoft Entra ID is the single front door. Every session is authenticated with corporate credentials, challenged with multi-factor authentication, and evaluated against Conditional Access policies before a single page loads.
- Single sign-on through Microsoft Entra ID
- MFA enforced by policy
- Conditional Access evaluates user, device, and location
- No separate intranet credentials to manage or phish
TAQA requirement: SSO through Microsoft Entra ID with Conditional Access and MFA, met natively.
Fast because it stays light.
Performance on SharePoint Online is won by discipline, not tuning servers: standard web parts, optimized media, and metadata-driven queries on Microsoft’s globally distributed infrastructure. Performance testing runs inside the testing phase before UAT sign-off.
Six phases, each closed by a stage gate.
A milestone-driven methodology combining Microsoft Success by Design, agile delivery, and PMI-style governance. Nothing moves to the next phase without a formal review and sign-off. Select a phase.
Initiation & Discovery Weeks 1–3
What happens
- Kick-off, governance and communication plan, stakeholder map
- Current state assessment and discovery workshops with Communications and IT
- Content inventory and migration assessment of the existing HQ intranet
- Risk identification and detailed project planning
Gate deliverables
Solution Design Weeks 4–6
What happens
- Information architecture, hub strategy, and site hierarchy design
- Homepage UX, navigation, and mega menu design with TAQA branding
- Metadata and taxonomy model, security model, search architecture
- Integration design and the content governance framework
Gate deliverables
Configuration & Development Weeks 7–14
What happens
- Hub, communication, and department sites created and configured
- Homepage, mega menu, quick links, and branding implemented
- Microsoft Search, metadata, and Power Automate workflows configured
- SPFx extensions and Microsoft Graph integrations, only where approved
- Progress demonstrated in sprint reviews throughout
Gate deliverables
Migration, Testing & Validation Weeks 13–17
What happens
- Migration rehearsal first, then the validated production content run
- Functional, integration, and security testing
- Accessibility validation against WCAG 2.1 AA and performance testing
- UAT with Communications and IT, defects resolved to closure
Gate deliverables
Production Deployment Week 18
What happens
- Production deployment and validation, including DNS and URL checks
- User verification with the launch group
- Go-live support alongside TAQA’s launch communications
Gate deliverables
Hypercare & Transition Weeks 19–20
What happens
- Hypercare support with incident management on the live platform
- Administrator and content author training, end-user awareness sessions
- Knowledge transfer to TAQA’s IT team and formal project closure
Gate deliverables
Governance cadence
- Daily stand-up, project team
- Weekly status, TAQA PM and Silwatech PM
- Bi-weekly risk and issue review
- Monthly steering committee with sponsors
- Design reviews with architects as required
Delivery discipline
- Requirements Traceability Matrix from RFQ to acceptance
- Stage gate reviews closing every phase
- Sprint demos for continuous stakeholder validation
- RAID register reviewed in governance meetings
- Formal change requests, impact analysis within 5 working days
Toolchain
- Azure DevOps and Azure Boards for agile delivery
- Microsoft Project for the plan, Teams for collaboration
- Figma and Visio for wireframes and architecture
- Azure Test Plans for test management
- SPMT and Migration Manager for content migration
We use AI to move faster. People stay in charge.
Silwatech runs an AI-accelerated delivery pipeline: named consultants own every decision and deliverable, and AI compresses the mechanical work between decisions. TAQA gets the same governed outputs, sooner.
Requirements & traceability
RTM drafts generated from the RFQ and checked for coverage, so no requirement is silently dropped between discovery and testing.
Design acceleration
More wireframe and information architecture options explored per design cycle, so TAQA chooses between real alternatives, not a single take.
Configuration & code
Provisioning scripts, SPFx scaffolding, and Power Automate patterns drafted by AI, then reviewed line-by-line before anything reaches a TAQA tenant.
Quality engineering
Test cases generated from the RTM, accessibility checklists derived from WCAG 2.1 AA, and regression suites kept current as scope evolves.
Migration assistance
Content inventory classification and metadata suggestions prepared by AI for human review, cutting the audit effort on legacy HQ content.
Documentation & training
Admin guides, user guides, and training material drafted alongside the build instead of after it, in English with Arabic support.
The guardrails
Every artifact is reviewed, corrected, and owned by a named consultant. AI drafts; people decide.
No TAQA confidential content enters public AI services. Work stays inside controlled environments.
AI-assisted code and configuration pass the identical review, testing, and stage gate process as any other work.
Deliverables are signed off by people at stage gates. How a draft was produced never dilutes responsibility for it.
Proof, not promise: the interactive TAQANET prototype accompanying this proposal was produced with this exact pipeline: AI-accelerated build, human architecture, review, and three full QA passes. It is the difference between telling you our approach works and handing you the result.
Twenty weeks from kick-off to closure.
Development completes by week 14; migration, UAT, go-live, and hypercare land in the six weeks after, matched to TAQA’s four-to-five-month expectation. Hover any bar or milestone for its deliverable.
| Role | Count | Responsible for |
|---|---|---|
| Project Manager | 1 | Plan, coordinate, and manage delivery to scope, schedule, budget, and quality. |
| Business Analyst | 1 | Gather and document requirements; translate them into functional specifications and the RTM. |
| Solution & Technical Architect | 1 | Own the solution architecture; keep implementation aligned with business, security, and scalability requirements. |
| Microsoft 365 SharePoint Consultants | 3 | Configure, customize, and implement the SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 solution. |
| UI/UX Consultant | 1 | Design the homepage, navigation, and page experiences to TAQA brand and WCAG 2.1 AA. |
| QA Consultants | 2 | Plan and execute functional, integration, security, accessibility, and performance testing. |
| Training Consultant | 1 | Build and deliver admin, author, and end-user training with documentation for adoption. |
| Activity | Silwatech PM | TAQA Tech | TAQA IT | TAQA Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project governance | A | I | R | C |
| Discovery and assessment | R | R | C | I |
| Environment readiness | A | R | C | I |
| Solution configuration | A | R | I | I |
| Custom app remediation | A | R | C | C |
| UAT testing | A | R | R | R |
| Production migration | R | R | C | I |
| UAT sign-off | I | I | R | A |
| Go-live sign-off | I | I | R | A |
| Knowledge transfer | A | R | R | I |
The questions your engineers will ask. Answered.
Ten questions we expect from the TAQA evaluation, with the answers we stand behind. Anything not covered here becomes an agenda item for the clarification workshop.
Where TAQANET goes after go-live.
Ideas for TAQA’s roadmap conversation, sequenced by readiness. None of this is in the current scope or price; all of it becomes possible because the foundation is native Microsoft 365 with clean metadata and governed permissions.
Switch on what’s already there
The intranet’s clean metadata and least-privilege permissions are exactly what Copilot needs to answer safely. Activation becomes a licensing decision.
A grounded assistant answering from intranet content only, with citations. Previewed today inside the prototype.
Drafting, summarising, and English–Arabic translation support inside the publishing flow for the Communications team.
Let the intranet tune itself
Classification suggestions applied against the term store as content is published, keeping search quality high without author effort.
Failed and trending queries mined monthly to create promoted results and close content gaps before employees complain.
A weekly “your TAQANET” summary in Teams or email, assembled per person from targeting data and reading behavior.
From intranet to workplace agent
Once Phase 2 connects HR, Oracle Fusion, and ServiceNow, requests like leave or tickets complete conversationally from TAQANET.
As entities join the hub estate, cross-company search and insight over policies, projects, and expertise across the TAQA Group.
Natural-language questions over adoption and engagement analytics for the executive dashboard audience.
Let’s build TAQANET.
A modern digital workplace on the platform TAQA already owns, delivered by a team that has done this before, with the product already visible in a working prototype.
A guided session of this walkthrough and the live prototype with TAQA’s evaluation team.
Deep-dive with TAQA IT and security on architecture, residency, and governance questions.
On award: governance setup, workshop calendar, and the week 1 project plan.
© 2026 Silwatech · Confidential, prepared for Abu Dhabi National Energy Company PJSC (TAQA). www.silwatech.com