The recently founded Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 882 "From Heterogeneities to Social Inequalities" at the University Bielefeld represents a framework for 17 sub-projects on social inequalities. With the promotion of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) by the INF project (integral part of the SFB) advisory and developmental services in the domain of information infrastructure will be provided. The VRE combines both a work and a project-specific research platform. The work platform bundles IT resources by bringing together various tools for administration, project management, and time- and location-independent collaboration work in a single environment adapted to researcher's specific working processes. The research component combines data management with further developments of social science methodologies. It provides services for archiving and re-use of datasets and is responsible for the infrastructural and methodological coordination of the data documentation. Almost entire data life-cycle is documented by implementing and applying DDI3 across all projects. In this talk, we present the challenges and barriers in designing and building-up a VRE for the social sciences. We mainly focus on documentation aspects, especially on the unification of varying documentation requirements which came up. Additionally, various key issues of research collaboration, as an outcome of the user requirement analysis, will be discussed.