Overlaps

It's hard to keep from buying the same technology twice. If the campus has a course management system, a library catalog, licensed productivity software, some type of web portal, a library federated search system and/or Open URL software, a proxy server, electronic reference software, Interlibrary Loan software, reference manager software, etc. you are already dealing with several vendors, each of whom have modules or products or features that dovetail nicely with each other, but probably do provide more than one way to do something. And on our campus some are purchased by IT, some by academic technology, some by the library, so you don't always even know about them. Personal web space/portfolios/authoring tools?, reserves?, authentication?, calendaring?, project tracking?, messaging?, communication tools?-- good luck figuring out which to use for what and then good luck again when you go looking for just one more function that's probably served up by several vendors. So maybe I need to find just one of those tools and make a mind map, grid, list or something?