I heard of this product about a year ago, through NERCOMP. Just today I noticed that NERCOMP has negotiated a licensing agreement with them - giving members (us) special pricing over the normal academic pricing. This might be worth looking into further.
Uportal is a free portal under development by institutions of higher-education.
The platfrom is based on Java, XML, JSP and J2EE.
Digital Archive Systems (DAS) can be used to capture, store, index, preserve, and distribute digital content. Such a system which supports versioning, could potentially provide the same functionality as the Document Management Systems we mentioned earlier.
NITLE is currently running a DSpace pilot: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2006/11/04/nitle_dspace_pilot_service_launched
However, the current releases of DSpace do not support versioning. DSpace 1.4 was released in December 2006. I have come across postings that claim versioning will be available in DSpace 2.0.
FEDORA is an open source DAS that does support versioning.
FEDORA: http://www.fedora.info/
The LMS Group is looking at Sakai as one of the possibilities to replace WebCT. Sakai is a community-source project, originally intended as a replacement for Lotus Notes though now being used extensively as a learning management system.
If Sakai is chosen as our new LMS - an even if it isn't - I think it's worth a close look as a possible collaboration tool. It also has some communication functions we should look at.
This video gives a good overview of the Sakai Project.
Chalk this up to the whole "google it" research method... This was the first real looking product that I didn't already recognize, so I took a look. It looks interesting. Except it's called "Zoho", which is a stupid name.
Even though everyone keeps saying to look at features, look at it from a user perspective, I think we need to be careful about reliability, support, and our capabilities to run the darn thing.
Another thing that is going to hurt something like this is that it's so different, we're just begging for widespread user discontent.