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Linden Lab has released a beta version of Second Life Enterprise (formerly known as Nebraska) a virtual world behind a firewall, aimed at corporate collaboration. http://bit.ly/1hasiP. The solution allows simultaneous connection of 800 avatars. It includes all features of Second Life and provides a number of pre-built buildings and avatars.

In this post I hold that the bigger the success of Second Life Enterprise (SLE), the bigger the benefit for other enterprise oriented solutions. Both for those based on OpenSim such as Dot-Aula, and for the proprietary ones such as Forterra Olive, Teleplace (formerly Qwaq, etc.).

The pie grows
In mature markets (those who have reached their limit of growth) it is understandable that the entry of new competitors is not beneficial for the running firms. The cake, which has already reached its maximum size, must be now shared with hungry newcomers.

In the realm of newly born categories, on the contrary, the entry of new competitors is paradoxically beneficial. The more the better, because it helps generating awareness, publicity and sales. The pie will grow and therefore the turnover of each competitor.

Despite the work of several hundred evangelists, businesses and institutions have not yet accepted the good news of virtual worlds for business. A few of them have heard of Second Life and its avatars. But they have never imagined that this stuff might serve their organization.

With few exceptions, when we visit companies to introduce virtual worlds for business, we are breaking new grounds in their minds.

Second Life Enterprise can help significantly grow the pie of virtual worlds for business. And that pie is also made up of those who work in OpenSim, the way we do.

Because we must acknowledge that Second Life is the quintessential virtual world today. And it si Likely to remain almost synonymous with virtual world for a few years. As a result, SLE’s desirable success will serve us all.

Virtual worlds: serious gaming

Second Life Enterprise will also help to impose the idea that virtual worlds are effective tools for remote collaborative learning and not just a game.

The leisure dimension of Second Life, which has been the best known feature of the platform, it never interested me.

In one of the firs posts of this blog confessed that “I have to admit that this respectable and entertaining dimension of therapeutic Second Life does not interest me at all, even I find it pointless and bland.

Moreover, for reasons that have guided our work in training, the negative connotations associated with Second Life we often assume an additional obstacle to overcome to reach the customer’s mind. The bailongo, the lightweight Charlita virtual sex with that is sometimes associated with Second Life is not much help to sell training, business meetings, virtual events, etc..

And besides if open source is significantly cheaper …

In OpenSim vs.Second Life we maintained that many of the benefits of OpenSim lied on the fact that OpenSim operates behind the firewall. Second Life now also works behind the firewall.

But, the open and modular system of OpenSim allows us to develop new features to suit the needs of each organization. In Second Life this obviously less flexible.

On the other hand, as SLE has an annual price of over $ 55,000, OpenSim solutions can be very competitive in price.

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Technorati claim code: UEDV838NH3WP

In a post on Rezzable, Jon Himmoff makes a critical review of his one year experience with Open Sim.

The work is complete and accurate. While he values very positively the improvements of late ( “OpenSim works, is getting better and will be the future of the 3D Web”), he  identifies 10 points that OpenSim needs to improve.

In this post I intend to summarize the 10 points and discuss briefly the post in Rezzable.

First the point on which I have nothing to comment, if not fully agree.

1. Physics is weak. The proposed solution is to replace the current engine with a more effective. There is nothing wrong.

2. Permissions. Open Sim has a long way to go. Agreed.

3. Documentation scarce. Ok

4. Admin Tools. We must have more information about the user, inventory and server memory. Perfect

5. Mesh support for mesh is needed. Ok

6. Scripting. Should be improved. But the good news is that you can program modules at the server level.

7. Movements between grids bad, but improving.

8. Concurrent users. Sim vs sim Second Life (50 approx) is superior to OpenSim (20-30). But in a single server we can hold 6 regions with less prims and get up to 400 users per server, compared with only 50 concurrent Second Life. We are working on many fronts to improve the ability of concurrent users, as does OSGrid.

Just two short comments. We work on developing virtual worlds for businesses and institutions Mostly education and training.

In our approach to OpenSim, the development of a currency like the Linden Dollar is not necessary. In fact the entire system of buying and selling that works in Second Life now creates more noise than benefits for our learning orientation.

Voice, on the other hand, is a priority for us. In fact it is one of the areas where we work harder. Having fought a long time against Asterix and FreeSwitch (open source), Teamspeak and Vivox (proprietary), our job now is to integrate Mumble (open source), which provides high quality sound, positional audio features and could arguably hacked into activating Lip Sync.

Source: Top 10 OpenSim Issues and Performance Update

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