Commercial Hosted Solutions:

PebblePad:
Strengths: The strength of PP lies in the fine granularity of access control with the system makes possible. This is a very important attribute for building user confidence and encouraging the addition of online content.
Usability: The PP user experience was very frustrating. There are no consistent hyper-linking to enable you to navigate around your portfolio. I kept finding myself getting several layers into the construction of my webfolio, realising I had add or upload content somewhere else in the system, which meant I had to navigate back to desktop. Create something new before being able to complete the job I originally started.
I found this not only poor in terms of usability, but also getting the job done. Because, having to navigate away form the first task I started, meant I kept getting distracted or 'inspired' (in the loosest sense of the word) to make something new, distracting me from my original task. I can see this leading to me having a number of uncompleted item in my portfolio.
Furthermore, initially I actually found it unnecessarily complicated to retrieve any content I had created. Leading on from this, I would never want to produce a huge amount of content as the way it is stored and organised in PP is poor. No organised folder structure CMS, just long lists.
Item - evidence - reflection structure is good. However within these feature there is no ability to format the text, apart from using the word editor, this appears to be a huge waste of time, because once I had edited within Word, I could not get the content back into PP.
Themes are patronizing "Bubbles", "Cartoon Creatures" - not appropriate to professional portfolios for HE.
Interface requires reinventing the wheel since it is divorced from real world content creation - will impose unacceptably high training requirement. In addition, we plan to use RSS to monitor student updates of their portfolios during the assessed phase - no RSS output from PebblePad (except in the very limited blog output format)?
Matt's reflections:
After a period of using Pebble Pad, I have found that all the 'additional' features are near useless e.g. experience, achievement, due to the inability to edit the content. I resorted to mainly using the Webfolio feature. Tagging is rudimentary and does not follow usual conventions, so will be likely to confuse students when they encounter content tagging in the real world.
However, the webfolio is far from perfect. Here are a list of frustrations:

1. Copying text. If a wanted to copy text from another program/website into my Webfolio, once you switch Windows, copy the text and return to PP it refused to let me select the text editing area in PP. Therefore I had to exit the editor and relaunch in order to paste the content.
2. The only place withing the Webfolio pages multimedia content can be position is above the main navigation. No ability to put pictures in text.
3. I didn't really understand the 'additional' features (achievements) in the context of the Webfolio, as you can't pull the content from these features directly to the pages, therefore I found my duplicating information.
4. NO UNDO! How in the 21st century can a text editor not know the 'crtl-z' to undo short cut!

Finally, the cost of PebblePad licences will be a barrier to many students, especially when free alternatives are readily available. For all of these reasons, we will not be recommending PebblePad as an ePortfolio solution for this cohort of students.

Blackboard:
Limited by cfs login to lifetime of university course, no extension on graduation. (Similarly Plone limited by cfs login to lifetime of university course, no extension on graduation).

Free Hosted Solutions:

Blogs

WordPress:

• Access control: Public or private, read only or read/write (so similar to WetPaint). As with WetPaint, invited users need to sign up for a WordPress.com account (they do not need to have thieir own blog). Students would need to grasp the concept of public and private online identities, possibly control access by cloning and editing their site.
  
• Quite easy to set up, very flexible (tagging, categories)
• Negative Points: The WordPress.com RSS feeds do not include static pages, only the blog posts. This does not fit very well with the architecture of the exemplar we developed since we plan to assess student portfolio contributions via the RSS feed.
  

Wikis:

• Wikispaces: We abandoned the original project wiki on this site because of poor navigation and slow editing.
  
• PBWIKI: Very hard to use, we quickly abandoned this site.
  

• Wetpaint: Easy to use, nice to edit, simple and quick to create pages and good navigation, with nested sets of pages and an easy access menu. Some of the editing was not intuitive, finding the options for adding attachments and changing the order of the pages or renaming them was on 'more tools' option, none of which were available on the home page as this cannot be renamed, or reordered. Help and FAQ wiki was excellent and soon directed to the right tools for the job. Threads could be useful for tutor feedback. Lots of RSS for updates, threads etc, again useful for staff management.
  

Pros:

1. Easy to use.
2. Simple layout quickly constructed, well ordered.
3. Online storage of files and photos.
4. Public - ACCESS CONTROL? Access is controlled by invitations from the site owner. Granularity is less than PebblePad - all or nothing(?) but with read only or read/write control.
5. RSS everywhere.

Cons:

1. Layout looks a bit clunky (no round edges!)
2. Choice of styles (overall theme/template for colours/ banner) was pretty limited (no brown!)
3. Widgets were easy to use (RSS, Google calendar) but limited and output was fairly simple but worked
4. Advertising - felt a bit overwhelming, especially where there was limited content of my own on the page. Thought wikispaces was better for this. Advertising is removed from education wikis on request.

After consideration of all the alternatives, we will ask students to set up ePortfolios on WetPaint and demonstrate the exemplar on that site to them. If a student asks to use a different site we will permit this as long as the proposed solution meets the assessment criteria, but we will not promote alternative sites.

Online Storage

• Box.net - 1GB free storage - read this
• SkyDrive: 5GB free, public & private folders. Discussion here.

PLEs

• Netvibes ginger- I liked the look of this. See digital ethnography example. Felt more like a much expanded iGoogle.

open source options (UK)

• ePET JISC funded project, Newcastle University
• Petal JISC funded, Oxford Brookes
• OSP open source portfolio initiative (part of Sakai)