Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red have announced that Immersive Workspaces is now on the Second Life Grid. Immersive Workspaces is an enterprise solution for a virtual business environment, in which users can have meetings or share content, for example. The fact that it is on the Second Life Grid enables businesses to take the decision regarding how much connectivity to the Second Life mainland they want – they can either have it fully integrated or keep it as a secure and separate facility.
At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London earlier this month, I lost count of the number of delegates from different enterprises who were bewailing the lack of business-friendly features on Second Life. Given Linden Lab's ambitions in what will clearly be a very important part of the virtual world market, this is something they need to address. It is a substantive problem as a perceived problem. It is not, at the moment, possible to have a Second Life instance behind a firewall – something many CIOs demand before they will consider adoption. Linden says that this is on the way in Q1 next year, in an important step.
Another problem is the lack of control. One delegate from an enterprise explained to me that it was not possible for them to use Second Life at present because of the inappropriate content elsewhere on Second Life; if they required an employee or client to download the software, and (for example) sexual content was encountered, that enterprise believed it could potentially be held liable for that content. The Second Life Grid will to some extent alleviate that, as a Second Life area, separate from the mainland and all other content, could be used.
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