| After you have determined that utilizing categories will be an added value to your organization's use of SharePoint Portal Server, you will need to begin designing a logical and feasible hierarchy. Designing a category structure involves planning and collaborating with your users and content owners . The target audiences for the category feature are content authors, readers, and visitors. You should consider these users stakeholders in your category design. Content authors will be very familiar with the workspace; therefore, readers and visitors should be the primary focus for your category structure design. They require logical guidance to the information for which they are searching. Ultimately, you want to design a category tree that would be easy to use for a visitor who has never used the workspace before to be able to quickly locate a document. Developing a stakeholder forum or steering committee is suggested to help you throughout the development of your workspace and its features. This will help ensure that your final product is acceptable and utilized by the target audience. SharePoint Portal Server will be successful if the end product provides added value to the resources that will use it and provide them with information that is readily and easily available. In order to create a successful category structure, an assessment of the current document organization is necessary. Understanding whether the current content organization is working well or whether it is difficult to use will help you achieve the following design goals: Design Goal #1 : Create a simple to use structure that end users will both understand and be somewhat familiar with. Design Goal #2 : Create your category hierarchy to facilitate expansion and growth. After interviewing your users and content owners, you can begin to develop your category structure. Determining the number of categories to create depends on the size of your organization and the nature of your business. You will need to determine the following: -
Determine how to organize content. Depending on the requirements you received from your users and content owners (through the interviewing process) you will need to choose how you will organize your content. There are a variety of ways to do this. You may choose to do it by department, project, geographic location, or subject matter. -
Determine the top level categories. For example, if you are responsible for a large company spread out across many locations, you might want to use geographic categories. Therefore, you may require hundreds of categories, each duplicated underneath every geography, to effectively support efficient user browsing. However, if you are part of a small firm, you may want to use department names as your top-level category structure, and therefore may only have a few. -
Determine the number of subcategory levels. It is important that you do not have an extensive number of subcategories which would eventually become difficult for users to navigate through. We suggest that you begin with a simple category structure consisting of one to three levels. Later you can modify the category structure as needed.  For more ideas regarding planning a category structure, see "Developing the Workspace," p. 533. and "Workspace and Dashboard Considerations," p. 561  | While modifying your category structure is fairly easy to do, timing is critical. See "Poor Performance During Category Maintenance" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of the chapter for ideas regarding both the process and the approach . | From our experience, categories defined in the first draft will most likely change. With time, your category structure will evolve based on the response from your users and their feedback and suggestions. You should also monitor the most frequent searches and possibly turn those search terms into categories. One method of tracking the most frequently performed searches is by perusing the end-user subscriptions. We suggest plotting out your proposed category structure in Microsoft Word (see Figure 12.4) before implementation. This will help you explain to users and content owners how you propose to set up the document organization. Obtaining their approval will help to eliminate changes after implementation. Figure 12.4. View of category structure preliminary design.  TIP It is suggested to include no more than 500 categories in a single workspace.
By building a quality category structure that includes a solid design and as few subcategories as really needed, future rework will be minimized. That is, sound end-user and content owner participation, plus efficient planning, will help to create a valuable category structure. It will also provide the immediate ability for the users to quickly understand how to access the information they need.  | 
