by Erica Driver.
When someone says “enterprise collaboration platform” or “office productivity suite,” I’m sure the last thing that comes to mind is virtual worlds. Instead you might think of software from vendors like IBM and Microsoft, maybe even Cisco and Google – that offers a vast and more or less integrated array of features to help people communicate and collaborate, produce and share office documents, and publish Web content. Likewise, when you think about virtual worlds what comes to mind is probably not business documents, meetings, eLearning, or project collaboration — but maybe Habbo Hotel or World of Warcraft or some fringe group activity in Second Life.
Well, hold onto your seat because the next few years are going to be a wild ride. Tomorrow’s Immersive Internet-based information worker software platform will provide a place where people will network and meet, teach and learn, rehearse business activities, visualize and collaborate on information and documents and products – even operate real-world facilities and systems . . . maybe even vehicles! People will be able to work with the same kinds of data and documents they do now but in an immersive 3D collaborative environment that creates a more social and natural-feeling experience than can be achieved via a conference call, email conversation or even video conference.
A basic necessity: using existing work materials and tools in immersive workspaces
Today a handful of software vendors and open source projects offer virtual world platforms suitable for creating immersive learning simulations and immersive workspaces. Most of these platforms have lightweight (if any) support for office documents but they do tend to have built-in communication and collaboration features like voice over IP (VoIP) and text chat. Built-in features like this are fine for the time being because they allow Immersive Internet project teams inside enterprises to run fully functional pilots without worrying too much about integrating with existing software or adhering to enterprise IT standards. But this approach is not viable long-term because enterprise IT buyers want to leverage the thousands (or even millions) of dollars their organizations have already spent to widely deploy enterprise communication and collaboration software. And information workers will not tolerate being forced to duplicate the efforts they’ve made to create office documents — virtual world platform vendors absolutely must focus on tight integration with common desktop productivity tools.
Successful virtual world platform vendors will integrate closely with information worker tools
During the next 3-4 years we will see virtual world platform vendors deliver ever-deeper integration with the leading enterprise collaboration platforms and office productivity suites. Virtual world platform vendors will focus on extending the capabilities of information worker platforms for the enterprise with features like visual, immersive social networking experiences, spatialized voice over IP, and many types of avatars for designed for specific business purposes (see figure).
We are seeing indicators all over the virtual world platforms market like:
- In the commercial sector: Forterra OLIVE, ProtonMedia ProtoSphere, and Qwaq Forums. The currently-shipping version of Forterra OLIVE (2.1) offers spatially accurate built-in VoIP, integrated text chat, streaming video, and broadcast messaging, and integrates with Microsoft PowerPoint so people can drag and drop slides in-world. OLIVE version 2.2, due out in late September, will add whiteboarding and application sharing, as well as support for Microsoft Word and Excel. Forterra is also working with IBM on specifications for integrating OLIVE with IBM’s Lotus Sametime unified communications platform. No date for beta release has yet been announced. ProtonMedia ProtoSphere has built-in audio, video, whiteboarding, text chat, application sharing, and wikis and blogs. Qwaq Forums is a SaaS offering that has built-in text chat and spatialized VoIP and integrates out of the box with Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org. You can easily drag items from your desktop or a folder onto a virtual wall in a forum and everyone using the same virtual space can see each other’s edits or modifications to content in real-time. Qwaq Forums also has an extensible API that allows developers to add functionality using programming languages like Python. New features that will be available in September include desktop sharing and workspaces designed for specific workflows (e.g., walls dedicated to brainstorming and workspaces that associate collaborative annotations with documents).
- In the open source community: OpenSim, realXtend, and Sun Project Wonderland. OpenSim 0.5 currently provides limited communication and collaboration functionality – most notably text chat and voice chat (if OpenSim is running alongside a SIP-compatible communications server). The Project Manhattan Microsoft Developer Community, which is external to Microsoft, is working on integration of OpenSim with Microsoft productivity and communication and collaboration tools. RealXtend, which is based on OpenSim, has voice chat and application sharing. On the realXtend road map are lip synch for voice, integration with Skype for voice, and integration with Google Spreadsheets and OpenOffice for desktop productivity. Via server-side scripting realXtend developers could integrate with Microsoft Office docs and other types of objects docs, but this integration is not available out of box. Sun Project Wonderland supports text chat and spatialized audio. The 0.4 release, due out later this summer, will provide a PDF viewer, application sharing, and voice access via telephone for people who are not in-world.
The next few years will bring a gold rush of new Immersive Internet technology innovation and development as businesses begin to implement virtual campuses, immersive workspaces, and immersive learning simulations and other serious games. After a swell, the virtual world platform market will go through the same market consolidation so many other markets have undergone (e.g., enterprise resource planning, enterprise content management, and enterprise collaboration platforms).
My take: as enterprise adoption of Immersive Internet apps reaches mainstream, the enterprise collaboration platform and office productivity suite vendors will become one and the same with virtual world platform providers, often through acquisition. So keep an eye on the startups in the virtual world platforms market, and strategic partnerships they strike with enterprise software vendors focused on information workers.
In the last decade and a half we muddled through the transition of “world wide what?” to “e-business” to “just plain business.” In the beginning, people couldn’t even imagine how the Web could be used to get real work done. Then we had the dot coms, which many people thought were part of their own special economy. Now the Web is perfectly mainstream and we can’t imagine getting work done without it. The Immersive Internet is in that same first stage now. Hold onto your hats ― here we go again.
Originally published in the Pund-IT Review, Volume 4, Issue 35. Please contact us for a PDF of the original article.
© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.
Filed under: Articles by Erica Driver
