Recently, the folks at Second Life announced the availability of the beta release of Second Life Enterprise, a fully-functional 'behind the corporate firewall' version of the popular virtual world.
In the past many large organizations such as IBM, Intel, and Northrop Grumman have established and 
grown a presence in the 'main' Second Life environment for corporate virtual meetings, training, and collaborative projects. What Second Life Enterprise allows these organizations, and perhaps others that were reluctant to embrace the virtual world, the ability to install and maintain a private virtual world for the enterprise, but one with all the features and capabilities of the public Second Life environment.
With Second Life Enterprise, the organization installs the solution in its own data center and gets some essential enterprise capabilities; backup and recovery, LDAP integration, and bulk account creation. So instead of users having to use 'fake' names like 'JoJo Stardancer' you can use their real names sourced from the corporate directory.
The enterprise environment also allows the transfer of objects and buildings the organization may have created in the 'main' Second Life into the private enterprise world.
Second Life has long had some very compelling use cases for large distributed organizations. Holding virtual meetings supplemented with rich multi-media content, conducting formal training sessions, global project team work sessions, and new employee onboarding are just a few of the many potential opportunities to leverage virtual worlds in the enterprise.
Early in 2010, the Second Life Enterprise solution will be supported by the Second Life Work Marketplace, an application and pre-built solution market that will allow content creators and providers to licence solutions for meetings, training sessions, seminars etc. to the Second Life Enterprise customer community.
This offering though, is clearly targeted at the large enterprise with strong IT resources and more than likely a widely distributed workforce. Pricing for the solution starts at $55,000 USD. But for a large organization, that typically brings together large numbers of people from around the world for meetings or annual planning sessions, the price for obtaining, preparing, and utilizing a virtual world for some of these events may well be a cost savings.
Looked at more broadly, this announcement seems to continue a trend of the 'enterprization' of popular public, or consumer social applications. Solutions that started out as pure 'social' tools, (Twitter, Facebook, Second Life) seem to grow and eventually find use cases for the enterprise. For me, if the initial barriers to Second Life use (heavy client, high learning curve) can be overcome by Second Life Enterprise, this may be the most impactful use of a 'social' tool inside large enterprises yet.