Forum .LRN Q&A: using dotLRN outside the educational sphere

People have said before in this forum that they are hoping to be able to use dotLRN for clients outside the education sector and I am curious to know if any attempts have been made in this direction so far? Is it feasible to reuse the entire dotLRN system or is it better to reuse only certain modules such as forums, portals, news and file-storage?

Ideally, I was hoping to be able to nest portal-enabled subsites (dotLRN instances?) arbitrarily in the site-map and give each subsite a configurable set of groups and applications. It seems dotLRN does not really offer this flexibility out of the box. However, if dotLRN is as well designed as I think it is, this kind of flexibility will not be too hard to achieve with some extra programming on my part. Thoughts?

The company I work for is about to use dotLRN as a project-focused group workspace. We're not up and running yet, but so far it looks like the main thing we need to do is rename parameters, e.g., change "class" to "project" and "department" to "client." It looks like you can do at least 90% of this sort of customization within the admin interface. Since you can choose to turn packages on or off for particular groups and subgroups, adding or deleting a bboard, FAQ, or whatever, can also be done just using the admin interface.

At some point we'll integrate Lars' "bugtracker" module and make a few other task-related customizations, but basically you can think of dotLRN as the base for a knowledge-sharing environment that's appropriate for any sort of asynchronous collaboration, whether that's a class, a work project, a community, or company.