Second Life Enterprise

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.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging

I was planning my next post to be on the simplest conference call scheduling tool out there, Rondee, that small companies can utilize to set up quick, free conference calls.  But since I foolishly left the files with all my Rondee screen prints on my work PC and did not upload them to Box, I have to switch gears.

Tonight I attended my first class session in Facilitation Skills, and the single thing that stood out to me the most, was the challenges and difficulties for some of the foreign students, and for the hearing-impaired students.  Much of this class centers around effective faciliation of meetings and group activities, and I can't even begin to imagine the extra burden these students have to overcome.  In addition to mastering the content, they still may have to struggle with the basic elements of spoken English communication.

And I am reminded of an activity I ran in my last class session of the HR Technology class that I teach.  I had all the students register in Second Life, and we had sort of a 'company' meeting in the virtual RIT Island.  It went fairly well, one or two students never did get fully 'alive' in SL, but most did and I think we had a good learning experience.

But what struck me about the Second Life meeting the most, was that one of my students who was hearing impaired absolutely came to life in the Second Life meeting.  She was the most active, positive and generally the best participant. I have to think that was at least in part due to the normal obstacles or barriers she has to face every day were eliminated in Second Life.  In our meeting, all communcation was text chat, it did not matter that she was hearing impaired.  The technology levelled the field for her and suddenly she really showcased her talent .

I got into this HR Technology stuff never realizing the power and capability of new technologies to really make a difference to people, but more than ever I believe that the right technologies can be truly transformative.