Question: What is the best game plan for building what I want. I'm rebuilding the company intranet and am trying to get our "Portals" system re-created in Drupal. I'm trying to learn Panels, because thats what I think would do this, but I just can't seem to get it working.

Menu at top, drop down lists for various webpages, tools, internal applications... and Department Portals.

When you click on a department portal, you get the same menu at top... and on the main part of the page you have a menu on the left, with content on the right. Menu stays on the left, content loads next to it. Each Portal has its own menu and content (least of which is "Home").

Ultimately, I'd like to be able to say
- users with role "Foo" can add/edit/delete Portal Bar.
- Each Portal starts with a "Home" - Each Portal has its own Menu tree's. (Picture 2 above has a < ul > for video tutorials that would be a second level menu. So more than one deep.)
- Content on the right side of the portal should be flexible (Video, PDF via fileviewer, etc)
- Portal Bar should have its own Folder to contain it's content.

I'm trying to do this in Panels, but I can't seem to put the pieces together in my mind and in practice. I hope I'm making sense, because the dizzying array of stuff is killing me lol.