SES (formerly Intelsat): Content Portal

At a glance

• What it is: the delivery portal in the SES (formerly Intelsat) platform set, built so each customer sees only the technical publications they bought and that fit their equipment
• Core capability: purchase-driven entitlement, role-based access control, watermarked PDFs and administrative reporting
• How it started: a four-week discovery, then design and development, then a run of extension work
• Built on: Laravel APIs on AWS, with integrations to the engineering systems that hold the publication record

This study covers the portal on its own. The umbrella study explains how it connects to the technical publications database and the service request portal.

The problem

Intelsat needed a better way for customers to reach user manuals, service bulletins and other technical content. Existing systems offered no customer self-service and could not support secure, configuration-specific access to documents. An airline buying inflight connectivity should see the publications for the equipment it actually bought, and nobody else’s.

Four gaps stood out:

• no customer-specific access controls
• no self-service portal for retrieving documents
• disconnected workflows between internal and customer-facing content
• limited reporting on document usage and engagement

Internally, sales and marketing teams also needed a way to promote new services to the right audiences.

Our approach

We started with discovery rather than a build. The first statement of work covered user journey discovery, wireframes, mid-fidelity designs, a UI kit and a technical delivery plan for the first release, with a view of later phases. Alongside the design work it covered the data sources and document formats the portal would draw on, the architecture, a compliance and hosting review, and a review of the third-party systems it would integrate with.

The question we kept returning to was entitlement. A customer’s access depends on what it purchased and on the configuration of its equipment, so the portal needed rules for both, not a single folder permission. Discovery produced the business rules for that, a technical analysis covering cloud infrastructure, entitlement logic and integration needs, and wireframes for the core journeys for both internal and external users.

Design then turned the mid-fidelity work into high-fidelity screens, with attention to large document libraries, responsive layouts for mobile and desktop, and filtering, previews and favourites for each user.

The build

The portal is a web application hosted on AWS. The first release included:

• internal and external content portals with synchronised data
• document tiles showing metadata, revision information and version history, with watermarked PDF support
• role-based access control for Admins, Partners and Customers
• search and filtering within collections
• bulk user onboarding, self-service account creation and password recovery
• audit logs, feedback mechanisms and usage analytics for administrators
• integration with Intelsat’s systems for ACT and PCT XML creation, and compatibility with Agile

After that first release, later statements of work scope further capability:

• Software packages: distributing software to field users alongside documents, with integrity checks on uploads, document-to-software associations and role-based authorisation
• S1000D publications: a scope to render S1000D XML as HTML, filtered by applicability and effectivity to a specific aircraft, with legacy PDFs and modern XML from one source. Our guide to S1000D explains the standard
• Single sign-on: corporate SSO for operator and internal users through Laravel Passport, with one operator to be onboarded first
• Integration with the publications database: automatic release of documents and metadata from the technical publications database into the portal, so the same record is not handled twice
• Reporting and engagement: reports on documents, collections, organisations and user activity, user preferences, favourites, collections that can be copied and assigned in the viewer, stronger PDF watermarking, bulk document import with revisions, and engineering change request and order integration with Agile
• Rebranding: a restyle of the portal to SES brand guidelines after the acquisition, scoped with no functional change

The same teams also provide application support and AWS management for the portal.

The outcome

Customers get personalised access to the publications they are entitled to, in a portal with the entitlement rules, access control and reporting needed to run it at scale. Internal teams and customers work from one synchronised library instead of disconnected workflows.

If you are weighing up how to deliver controlled documents to customers, our guide to document portals and entitlement access control covers the design questions in general terms.

Related services: Technical Publications & Structured Content · Regulatory Publishing · Content Portal