First of all I have been reading the DotNetNuke 4 book and wanted give my congratulations on your succes, great story on how it all started.... As this question will show, I have not had a chance to read far enough to answer this question on my own.

I want to create a Service portal to track project statuses for various customers. It will mostly be for a technician to log in and fill out forms with serial numbers and other installation data as well as upload completion photos. Where it could be tricky is I want to be able to create seperate portals for each customer to login too to see the status of their projects only.

My best friend is an excellent .net programmer and would love to build my dream site but doesn't have that kind of time nor do I want to ask that of him. What I would like to do is use a framework such as DNN where I can do the major layout and only ask for his assistance when I need some custom programming done...

SO the question is; is DNN the right solution for that scenario?

Thanks

Bruce is right.  I think DNN is a perfect fit for the requirements you described.  Personally I would choose a slightly different module however.  I would look at using one of the various "forms" modules that are available.  Given that you are likely to want to gather data specific to your business, having a module that provides lots of flexibility and control is well worth th learning curve associated with some of the solutions.  Some of the form modules, like XMod, even have an API for adding additional functionality to the module which means that a good forms module can continue to grow with your requirements.

I agree that XMod would fit the bill for this too. I started to suggest it, but Xmod can have a learning curve and has been known to cause new people some headaches.