·          Shared collaborative workspace for organisations, networks, groups and teams

·          Identity management of research personnel including single sign on to related trusted systems

·          Central document storage and document management capability

·          Communications both internally (intranet) and externally (websites)

·          Unified content management – workflow driven approval and publishing system for both internal and external content from a single interface and single content source

·          Data-level connectivity with trusted systems – record your data once, pass to many systems without duplication.

The NIHR Portal Project was formally initiated on 14 March 2007 and launched to its first operational users (PCRN) on 18 June 2007.  It currently supports over 1200 users across the following networks and organisations: NIHR IS Programme Team, Primary Care Research Network, DeNDRoN, Mental Health Research Network, Medicines for Children Research Network, Stroke Research Network, National Cancer Research Network, Diabetes Research Network, Department of Health R&D, Northern Ireland Clinical Research Network, Health Technology Co-operatives (Bowel Function and Devices for Dignity), United Kingdom Clinical Research Network (including the Comprehensive Clinical Research Networks), Biomedical Research Centres and the Centre for Evidence based Dermatology (CEBD).  New sites under construction include NHS R&D Forum, UKCRF Network and RTTQA (RadioTherapy Trials Quality Assurance).  All existing sites and new builds are supported with a training programme and a growing user support network.

The public face of the NIHR Portal at http://portal.nihr.ac.uk currently promotes the concept of applying for Portal access at an organisational level, and there are several new sites under construction and requests under review.  It is also the only accessible interface with the National Research Register archive, and provides a public search tool for the active Portfolio Database.  Both these public-facing facilities are reflected in statistical analysis of Portal usage using our standard tool Google Analytics.

NCRN Specific Portal: https://portal.nihr.ac.uk/sites/ncrn