Wipro Innovation = Redundancy?

Today's last expedition led me to te Wipro Innovation Isle (I guess it they'd love to abbreviate it to Wii - but that one's already taken in SL). For people working in the IT Services a well known name as it is one of India's giants when it comes to IT services.

"Wipro Tech is an information technology service company established in India in 1980. It is the global IT services arm of Wipro Limited (in operation since 1945, incorporated 1946). It is headquartered in Bangalore and is the third largest IT services company in India. It has more than 79,832 employees as of December 2007, including its business process outsourcing (BPO) arm which it acquired in 2002. Wipro Technologies has over 300 customers across U.S., Europe and Japan including 50 of the Fortune 500 companies." (Wikipedia)

Near the end of 2007 there were speculations of Wipro Technologies considering to take over Capgemini and thus Sogeti as well, but in the end it was a no show. The corporate website puts focus on 'applied innovation';

"At Wipro we have fine-tuned the science of viewing innovation through the lens of practicality to design unique solutions for end customers. Applied Innovation is the ability to infuse newer ideas and newer ways of doing things into all parts of the organization, and improve business outcomes, often without major disruptive change. It is a 360-degree business approach covering process, delivery, business and technology Innovations that help Wipro to work
collaboratively with clients for cost take-outs, speed to market and new business opportunities."

It is this theme that is the starting point for the Wipro presence in Second Life, which looks to be in the first stage of the experiment. It is a 3 sim cluster, of which only one is fully build, one only holding an expo stand and an empty sim.

Applied Innovation is the ability to infuse newer ideas and newer ways of doing things into all parts of the organization, and I can well imagine this applies to their Second Life expedition as well. I do believe we have to bring Virtual Worlds (newer ways) beyond the average marketing department (i.e. into all parts of the organization). The question remains how to do this.

Let's see if Wipro can bring the answer. The sim is filled with an assorted array of buildings, with two larger builds standing out. The first of these is the 'Learning Center' and is shaped a little like the Sydney Opera (not really, buyt you can see which building I'm referring to).

Please reread the lines on the triple sim: "One build, one half build, one empty." This is pretty much the case with the Learning Center as well. It holds two auditoria, and right outside there's an amphitheater. Also, at the second level it has several empty officerooms.

Further onto the campus we see various buildings, like a 'Client Engagement' building, a library and a datacenter each filled with several workstations / cubicles.

Finally I arrived at the second large building, a four storey square concrete office block which looked a little cramped when I walked into the hall and up the staircase. It made me wonder how much of the build is actually shaped like their real life offices... This building is labelled 'Offshore Development Center' and that is what interests me, what would bring innovation to the virtual workspace.

I was a little disappointed though when there were more rooms with workstations, and more and more. But no show. One of the great benefits I see for Virtual Worlds is what they potentially can do for the offshoring industry, as offshoring projects often require a lot of attention; extra management, extra communication, extra code checking etcetera and in the virtual workspace where you can collaborate while both in offshore and rightshore location would greatly aid this process.

Yet I'm fully aware of the limitations Second Life has in this regard. There's no real integration with development suites or management tools. Then there's always the issue of security. I can't really blame Wipro for not finding the solution for Second Life, but I had hoped for more info, more ideas.

The last redundancy in the sim was when I moved from the cantine inside the ODC to 'the Glacier', a cafe on the campus.

As for the build itself, I find it of average quality. It is a melee of textures (a lot of default SL texturing) and styles. As I said, I'm under the impression that part of it is based upon real life buildings, so maybe they had to work with what they had. Otherwise, I'd say the triple auditorium, the cramped staircases etcetera don't really utilise the 3D-ness of a virtual environment.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Wipro%20Innovation%20Isle/109/225/23

New HOAP for Second Life

I had lost a little faith in Second Life, but there's new hope coming about when it comes to Second Life being a serious tool for business: Html-On-A-Prim.

Gwynneth Llewelyn wrote an excellent article on this new feature and its implications, here's a short extract:

"A few months ago - not many in terms of “real life”
hours, but an eternity in Second Life® - a brief discussion with Linden Lab exposed the rumour that they were planning to integrate an HTML browser inside the Second Life application client. This is not a revolutionary breakthrough - things like ActiveWorlds or OpenCroquet have done it ages ago, and the world did not shatter and end at that time.

Some eager residents of SL were happy about the idea. At the very least, you would be able to exchange notecards with “rich text”. Perhaps even have a way to browse a bit while in-world - no more need to open up your browser to check the Help pages, do some forum posting, or even insert events directly from in-world.

On a second stage (according to Linden Lab®), HTML may be directly drawn on top of a prim face. This would mean, for starters, a way to get outside information on top of a 3D world. Older platforms already allow for this usage of HTML. Things like proper text management on top of a prim are finally possible - books, slide-show presenters, coreboards, even clothes vendors, will be able to get away with textures for writing text, and use HTML-rendered text instead.

The third stage is full integration. Prims with HTML pages (and LL is still thinking on how this will happen) will be point-and-click browseable. Neither we nor Linden Lab have yet figured out how exactly this will be implemented..."

HTML on a Prim boosts options for virtual workspace

Although the features at this time are pretty basic, it has brought Second Life back into focus for me as a possible platform for serious collaboration. My frustration with SL was mainly caused by lack of real collaboration possibilities.

What it all boils down to is that you rez a prim and put a webpage on it. Now you can look at a webpage with others. Nothing spectacular, but it gets more serious when you can look at secure webpages. I've done some tests with a colleague displaying secure content. Through the built-in media browser you can access and log into secure sites, then use the option to 'send current URL to parcel' and it will display set itself at the parcel media URL and display at the screen. Your fellow observer won't see the webpage unless he's logged in as well. Today we started working through some of our project tools (like JIRA) in which we can monitor our projects.

It works. We could both look at 'classified content' and discuss the status of a project, manage service calls and have a look at the time budgets for the project at hand. At the end there was one question nagging me: Security? Anyone?

The thing is, Second Life doesn't have the reputation of being a safe and sound business environment (remember ABN is partly moving to Active Worlds because they need a secure environment). What happens with my username and password when I enter this info in the built in browser?

A Quick HOWTO:

Maybe it's me, but it took me some time to fiddle out how it worked. And because there's a little bug (it can crash your sim) I thought I'd do you the favour of a quick 'howto'.

The feature only works with the new Release Candidate 1.19.1 client (March 6th) and there are a few new features that are obvious - such as the extra media tab next to the talk settings - and some little settings to tweak in the 'Preferences' bit.

The basic element for displaying web content is in the estate management settings, the 'About Land' configuration where you have the option to set the media url for the parcel. The downside is that you can only set one URL per parcel. Remember to select the texture that will be used on the prims to display the content as well. If you're working behind a firewall or proxy, you now have the option to set proxy stuff as well in the preferences bit (pic right)

Then build the prim, select the desired texture (in this case the new *default media texture) corresponding with the texture set at the media options in the previous step. Then go to the general tab and select prim properties. Where you used to have buy, open and sit options, there are now two extra's: Open Media Content and Play Media Content.