| Once the workspace is created, an associated Web site and dashboard is also created. Any browser-enabled user can leverage the power of your SharePoint Portal nearly immediately. However, an important first step for portal dashboard development is updating the home page, which should highlight information for the end users that is especially useful. Web Parts may also be added to display additional information. A typical dashboard site for a business group, or our Finance department at ABC Company, would include information relevant to the group 's work and perhaps a Web Part or section dedicated to project status. If the entire ABC Company were going to use the portal, a dashboard site that featured an overall approach relevant to all business groups or departments would make sense (with perhaps section of the dashboard dedicated to critical or high-use organizations). At ABC, the financial liaison sub-group to ABC's Human Resources department determined that searches for information about employee benefits would be extremely useful, as well as quite common. Therefore, they decided to post information about employee benefits on the home page under a Web Part called HR Benefits. To keep all financial group employees informed about new tax laws, another Web Part called Tax Updates was created as well, providing the latest feeds from a common subscription services. ABC added additional value to their dashboard site by including Web Parts that displayed business information regarding company financial earnings, historical versus current analyses, and access to Microsoft NetMeeting (as another collaboration tool). Custom Web Parts were also planned early in the deployment process, to provide access to Excel spreadsheets with quarterly sales and margin figures for each of the discrete product groups. Leveraging the Category Assistant To facilitate excellent search capabilities, ABC spent the time up front determining categories in which to group similar documents and document types. Special attention was paid to hierarchies, especially the name and size of subcategories ”no subcategory was allowed to contain more than 1,000 documents, for example. This was enforced through regular management/operations exception reporting performed by the technical support organization. The Category Assistant was also leveraged to automatically assign categories to ABC's existing documents. It categorized new documents as well, by comparing the list of words for each category to the list of words contained in each new document. And to ABC's pleasant surprise, they found that SharePoint Portal Server actually automatically categorized most of their new documents into multiple categories, thereby enhancing and improving upon their typical search results. ABC ensured a high success rate in categorizing by using a relatively high precision number. The trade-off was, of course, that not all documents were categorized. But those that did get categorized mapped very nicely back to the category structure.  To learn more about category structures and the Category Assistant, see "Managing Categories and the Category Assistant," p. 248. Leveraging Best Bets Finally, ABC Company took advantage of SharePoint Portal Server's "Best Bets" to further improve search efficiency. The Best Bets in a search consist of documents considered especially relevant to the search, and therefore aid the end user in ultimately finding the "best" result or answer to a given set of search criteria. And since SharePoint Portal Sever posts these Best Bets at the top of a search list, end users naturally gravitate towards pulling these documents first. Satisfied with their search results sooner than otherwise would occur, these end users need no longer search the portal. The result? Fewer searches/ scans , and therefore improved search responses for every user. NOTE Two types of Best Bets exist: Keyword Best Bet ” results that are relevant to a keyword. Category Best Bet ” a document relevant to a particular category.
ABC found it particularly easy to identify a document as a Best Bet. By updating the Search and Categories tab on the Properties page of each document, they were able to enter metadata regarding both Keyword and Category Best Bets. To read more about Best Bets and their role in the SPS production environment, see "Category Best Bets," p. 318. | 
