Some days ago I hole a presentation at the Drupal User Group in Hannover about the current state of dashboards in Drupal. I'm currently starting to work on my bachelor thesis and dashboards for information integration in a corporation context will be part of it. 

You can find my presentation slides attached to this blog post or on slideshare.

On some of my websites I use to write content without publishing it right away. Thus I often create a custom view that displays imcomplete (i.e. unpublished) nodes inside a block that is only visible for me and other Administrators. This block includes a direkt edit link to every unpublished node, which makes it easy to access and directly edit your content drafts.

Of course this view can also be extended by using taxonomy filters via url arguments or by creating a page view that displays content filtered or sorted by author.