Although Portals can offer authentication, we think that solutions that use a separate authentication mechanism will be more flexible.
A logical starting place is simply to create a dotLRN portlet that means someone signing in to the portal can see a page like MySpace and be passed through to dotLRN from that page (with a path back). This would allow political/marketing claims to be made.
I think the next place to go is a significant but worthwhile development effort. That is to recreate the dotLRN portal functionality with some of the emerging standards. Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) sits on top of JSR168 portlet api for Java and a mooted C# portlet api for .NET
http://xml.coverpages.org/wsrp-overview200206.pdf
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp/
The JSR168 specification is due to be adopted in uPortal, but should also work in IBM, Sun, Oracle and Jakarta Jetspeed portals. Supporting WSRP would allow integration of .NET portlets as well.
There is a real question about whether these developing specifications can support the depth and sophistication of dotLRN, but the involvement of Glenn Golden from the U Michigan CHEF project (which seeks to create dotLRN type functionality using JetSpeed) in the JSR168 effort suggests dotLRN type use cases are being considered.
Of course a lot of this may be 'pie in the sky' but I think these are relevant technologies if dotLRN wants to integrate 'standard' portal technology at more than a superficial level.
Finally, if going down the Java portlet route to get deeper integration with uPortal is felt to be undesireable, it may be worth considering a tcl portlet api to sit alongside JSR168 and a possible C# portlet api under WSRP (see p 11 of the wsrp link above)
