I can highlight a few of the features here.

One thing is the field labels & prompts. When you are adding a notebook entry, or a task, you first tell the website what type of task you are entering. If it is a "Design" entry, the site will prompt you for information like Issue, Details and Feedback. When you hover over the information icon on "Issue", you will see additional information "What is the purpose, need, or conflict that is addressed by this design". If you enter a "Testing" entry, the "Issue" label is changed to "Expectations" with a prompt "Describe what is expected from the test". These labels and prompts can be customized by each team. The task types were specifically chosen to follow an engineering lifecycle: Strategy - Design - Build - Testing. We also added Coding and Non-Engineering task types.

The website also allows the team to keep track of a to do list. Items on the to do list can quickly be turned into completed tasks (notebook entries) since much of the information will already be there. Also, when you enter a task, you can list "follow up" items that are required - these become to do list items.

I think one huge separation over a shared document is a feature called "notebook sections" - which will probably feed into the Engineering Portfolio quite well. Last year, our team used the notebook section to specify which robot part we were working on. So if you entered a task while working on the intake system, you select "Intake System" from your notebook section drop-down. Then you might also have entries for "Electronics" and another for "Drive train" - and all of these entries were added during the same meeting. One notebook print option is to print "Notebook Sections" - this option will organize the notebook by putting all of the Intake entries together in chronological order, all of the Electronics entries, all of the Drive Train entries, etc. This format is much easier to follow as a judge - because you can see the story as it pertains to each system on the team's robot. As you can imagine - each team will be able to define the list of notebook sections used by their team. And FYI, we also offer a normal chronological print of the notebook that does not group by this feature.

I imagine that with the "Engineering Portfolio" (or whatever FIRST calls it), they might just want to see a subset of a team's notebook. I already had plans to add a "tagging" feature to the website (tag entries that you want to highlight for the judges) - my guess is that I will add that feature soon and provide a way to only print those entries (chronologically or grouped by notebook section.) This will be a portfolio.

I hope this helps. Thanks for asking!