Abstract: Portals are widely suggested as important tools to facilitate the hard task of finding and accessing useful information for learning, teaching and research. In this context, the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) is enrolled in the Subject Portals Project (SPP) with the aim of developing and deploying subject-based portals to provide the UK's HE and FE communities with integrated access to distributed resources within the JISC Information Environment (IE). The project is being developed in a distributed environment at the RDN hubs: BIOME, the bio-medical sciences hub; EEVL, the engineering, maths and computer sciences hub; HUMBUL, the humanities hub; PSIgate, the physical sciences hub; and SOSIG, the social sciences hub. The project deliverables will allow each hub to customise a portal for its domain-specific needs. The SPP will provide single access points with common functionality (e.g. access management, user-profiling, cross-searching) supported by a portal framework. This core functionality will provide users with streamlined access to subject-specific datasets. Access Management (AM) has a key role within the portal as users have to be authenticated via multiple authentication mechanisms against different AM Systems (AMS) and scenarios (e.g. Athens). Thus users logging in from anywhere will be able to have personalised services and obtain authorisation to access protected remote resources. The AM functionality for SPP involves the deployment of a local AMS and the implementation of authentication, authorisation and logic to manage users, groups, roles, access control, etc. This functionality also needs to deal with several AMSs in a complex environment.