Second Life Enterprise just went Beta.  What does Enterprise do?

• familiar Second Life environment
• completely within the company intranet, behind the firewall
• prepackaged virtual regions, with a four-corners auditorium that can hold 400 people.
• set of standard business avatars.

Among Open Beta Participants:

• IBM,
• Northrop Grumman,
• Naval Undersea Warfare Center,
• DefenseWeb Technologies,
• Case Western Reserve University,
• The New Media Consortium,

Read the press highlights

• CNN, Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life
• InformationWeek, Second Life Steps into the Enterprise
• eWeek, Second Life Takes Virtual Reality Behind the Firewall at I

One of the major inconveniences that are precluding the adoption of Opensim (and Second Life) based virtual world technology has been the impossibility to visit these virtual worlds using the browser. People are used to seeing everything inside a browser, and are even willing, in some cases, to download a plugin, but in general get discouraged when they have to download a whole new client, learn a new and complicated interface, etc.

That's why I got very excited when I found a reference, in Jeanricard Broek's blog, to a new release of 3Di's viewer-in-the-browser plugin, called  3Di OpenViewer. I googled for "3Di OpenViewer", and I found a fantastic tutorial by Zaki; in some minutes, I was running the viewer inside Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and I was logging in to my own grid, Condensation Land!