I got a chance to work with one of the top 5 fortune company for re-design of their intranet portal. I'd like to share this project experiences and power of sharepoint team collaboration with you folks - We worked in conjunction with one of the top 5 fortune company's IT to re-design their intranet portal, the company's enterprise intranet portal. The design was based on well-researched employee needs and business goals and implemented using the latest release of SharePoint Portal Server 2007.

The key areas of improvement in their intranet portal included development of new capabilities for:

1. Improve the ability to find and retrieve the "right" information
2. Information workers were confused by too many choices for storing content
3. Teams needed common collaborative processes to work effectively together.
4. Supporting multiple storage and collaboration platforms was expensive and complex for IT.

Employees who used previous versions of their Web found it difficult to find the right amount of current, relevant, and authoritative information in the diverse and fast changing environment of their intranet. Four key problems related to finding the right information:

• It took too long to find the "right" information. This was often described in terms of taking too many mouse clicks to find useful information or not being able to find the right information after spending considerable effort searching and navigating the intranet.
• It was hard to locate information and knowledge that was relevant in the context of the immediate task for an employee to complete his or her work. For example, search results often included too much unrelated information to be useful.
• It was difficult for an employee to know when they could rely on information they found on the intranet. It was also difficult to ascertain whether that information was timely, accurate and complete.
• Employees found it difficult to know the best keyword choices to use for searching because of the large number of acronyms, technical terms, project code names and product names in regular use at their organization.

One of the best solution to find the right information(i.e., reduce the number of mouse clicks) is provide a custom search based on their custom content type(which is inherited from **Document** contenttype)

Ex: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1881103&SiteID=17