Here are the problems I have. I can have portfolio software, but it doesn't really lend itself to community discussion or providing feedback. I can have a CMS like Blackboard but it cordons off all the classes from one another (and it's not very good for providing feedback on student compositions). I can use Google docs for feedback, though not for anything else. And though I can use Google Docs, I'm not sure my instructors can manage the various permission structures like sharing a folder among a group of student users so they can upload and comment on each others work. And I'm still left to figure out the rest of it. WordPress might offer a similar kind of solution, where a tech savvy instructor could get a community discussion, have students get feedback, and set up individual portfolios. But I'm not sure how it works as a program wide solution, and I haven't begun to talk about assessment issues.
I used to feel somewhat befuddled by the absence of what seemed like a fairly straightforward constellation of features for a piece of educational software. After all, they were all features that existed in one place or another already, for example:
collaborative composing of text documents short, realtime discussion a journal and portfolio a forum where you can follow users and threads photo and video sharing