I'm back to working on the portal. I've been digging deeper into SSO, as it seems like a piece of the puzzle that will be the most difficult and time consuming. I've found SUN's samples and "instructions". They're so confusing, it appears you already need to know how to do this to understand them.
I've found a fascinating ppt presentation given at the Pan European Portal Conference from Peter Schelleman. The slides are not the interesting part, but the notes have all the guts to a real-world implementation of the portal in a university setting. Reading all the issues they've gone through, with outsourced IT and numerous employees working on it, I don't feel so bad. It has amazing ideas, view points, and suggestions. If you have some time (it's pretty long) I strongly suggest reading it.
Also, for those developers out there, here's a good document on developing secure web apps and authentication issues. Probably not as interesting to most users, but full of good info anyway. There is also a more portal oriented overview on Single Sign-On and Sessions.
