The use of e-portfolio systems in higher education has not grown as anticipated by early adopters when the potential benefits first became apparent, yet the promise remains. The vision of a flexible tool that meets multiple goals--serving as a showcase for student work, promoting self-reflection, supporting assessment and accreditation efforts, moving with students as they left academia--can succeed if each higher education institution plans for the adoption of e-portfolios by starting with the fundamental requirements for its unique community. The first steps in adopting any information technology consist of deciding what purpose the system will address and what functionality the target institution requires. For an e-portfolio system, these are particularly challenging tasks, given that the e-portfolio community--vendors and practitioners alike--have neither established a one-size-fits-all definition nor a corresponding set of standard functionalities. Higher-education institutions deploy e-portfolios to capitalize on the expected benefits of supporting a variety of student achievements, both as showcases of their work and for self-reflection, as well as providing a more authentic form of learning assessment. This article shares a categorization of functionalities developed over a one-year period by an e-portfolio work group in charge of determining a set of criteria for the selection and evaluation of one institution's next iteration of an e-portfolio system. (Contains 3 figures and 16 endnotes.)