A generic online portfolio we have designed and tested has been used for a variety of educational and research purposes. The most intensive use has been in a senior level university course in Global Change. However, it also has been used in other university courses and for managing dialog on research projects where participants are spatially separated or require an asynchronous platform for maintaining dialog. An unanticipated but novel use is as a means to manage quality control messages from a realtime data acquisition system. Features available on the portfolio make it highly adaptable for faculty members who have both teaching and research obligations and whose teaching overlaps strongly with their research. Proliferation of online journals, databases, modeling and analysis tools – all of which are needed for both teaching and research – call for new means of organization in the office of the faculty member of the future. We describe the use of online portfolios as one step toward meeting those needs.