Software engineering education is most often complemented by a software engineering project where a team of students has to develop a large software system. At a distance teaching university such projects challenge the students in communication and collaboration, because team members work in different places, many miles away from each other. We present an ECLIPSE-based unified platform that leverages available tools and solutions and discuss the problems involved. Besides using plug-ins that support the students during implementation, our platform integrates a collaborative distant education environment and a software project management system that will ease the students’ collaboration in the software engineering project.