I can get a child's portalsettings in a parent portal, but it seems like there should be an easier way to do this. None of the standard menu systems seem to have a way to do this. Is there not a way built in that I am just not seeing?

I am trying to set up an installtion of DotNetNuke as an extranet. This means I will need a child portal for each department so that they are able to edit their content and have the correct permissions. So the idea would be that I can put multiple menus on a page, each menu getting a different reference of PortalSettings so that the final product would look like the current DotNetNuke flyout menu and to the end user it wouldn't look like each section was a completely different Portal. 

This is easy enough to do if the menus were just links to the child portals, but because it will be an extranet there will be so much content I will need dropdown menus for all major areas. I can't see anyway in any menus I have used to be able to pass in another portals PortalSettings so that the menu can build all of the menus for that portal. I could create it manually myself in the skin or create a whole other module to accomplish this, but am trying to see if anyone else has had this need and programmed something to do this. Hope I am explaining it better.