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One of the hardest problems in building an AI assistant for a website or intranet isn't the AI part. It's the permissions part. How does the AI know what a specific employee is allowed to see? How do you prevent it from surfacing a confidential HR document to someone who has no business reading it? How do you keep AI responses in sync with content that changes constantly?
Manufacturing companies need two completely different types of websites, and most CMS conversations treat them like they're the same problem. One is internal: employees, HR, company news, policies, the kind of information that keeps a distributed workforce aligned. The other is external: product specifications, dealer resources, pricing, the technical documentation that helps a builder in Georgia spec the right engineered lumber or a purchasing manager decide between two suppliers.
If your organization used Workplace by Meta, the clock has run out. Meta shut down new content posting on September 1, 2025, and moved all accounts to read-only mode. On June 1, 2026, all Workplace accounts are permanently deleted: data, history, groups, and all. If you haven't already migrated, you are out of time for a careful transition and into damage control territory.
No release this month the team has been heads-down on some bigger projects and will be back with updates soon. Here's everything else.
PortlandLabs is proud to be a winner of the Leader award from SourceForge, the world's largest software reviews and comparison website.
Every intranet has a graveyard. It's the section no one visits, full of pages that were accurate in 2021, linked to a tool that no longer exists, and last updated by someone who left the company eighteen months ago. Most organizations know it's there. Almost none have a reliable process for finding it before an employee does.
A website's permissions are mostly about who can edit a page. An intranet's permissions are about who can see that the page exists in the first place. That distinction sounds small until you're the person who accidentally published next quarter's layoff list to the entire company instead of just the leadership team.
Wireframing is one of those steps that sounds optional until you have shipped something without doing it and spent two weeks undoing decisions that a thirty-minute sketch would have caught. Whether you are planning a public-facing marketing site, a compliance-heavy government portal, or an internal intranet, getting your structure right before you touch the CMS saves everyone real time.
Most organizations don't choose their internal communication tools so much as accumulate them. Someone on the team starts using Slack. IT sets up a shared drive. HR sends policy updates by email. Leadership records all-hands videos on a platform nobody checks. Before long, information is scattered across a dozen places and employees spend more time figuring out where to look than actually getting things done.
Most intranet home pages are built once, celebrated at launch, and then quietly abandoned. Someone puts together a nice design, leadership approves it, the IT team deploys it, and six months later the news section is still showing the same three announcements from last quarter. Employees notice. They stop checking. Eventually they stop logging in at all.