Interdisciplinary challenges in research today require increasingly cooperation among researchers. The demand for building up Virtual Research Environments (VRE) becomes more and more urgent than ever before. Built on top of web, VRE systems aim at supporting research activities with much more efficient methods for sharing data and knowledge bases. In this paper, we present our recent work on development of a general-purpose VRE system by extending Sakai, an advanced collaboration and learning platform, with tools for accessing Microsoft Exchange Server through WebDAV, integrating existing grid tools to access remote computing and data grid resources via Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), and managing documents to help organising workshops and conferences