Q&A
1) Corporate fire walls, (possible external hosting of SL to get round this) >> See Knowledgebase article: http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=029 >> Also, consider joining the mailing list slcorporateuse.com: https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/slcorporateuse and posting questions to it.
2) Security of data. We will host confidential meetings in SL. But all the presentation material and files will be uploaded onto your servers in order to do this. How secure are you? How can I convince my corporate IT Police that this is good enough? >> We encrypt all transaction to and from the client.
3) How can I get a staff of thousands into SL with avatars all ready to go? >> The Registration API lets you create and register as many accounts as you want. For more information: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/RegAPI
4) With respect I think your Welcome Island was better before it's recent change. The Welcome Island at Dell is now the best intro to SL, but it currently crashes. >> The previous orientationisland stations are in your Inventory in SL (Click Inventory. Click on the triangle in front of Library, then Objects. About 6 down, you'll see "Orientation stations w/ notecards". Inside are the current Orientation Island stations.) We plan to release the current OI contents soon for anyone to be able to customize and reuse to create their own orientation experience. Many businesses have already created their own orientation experience in Second Life. Tied with the Registration API, this enables you to create a custom, branded experience from your website into your Second Life properties.
5) Instability and regular crashing. When trying to organize meetings for management and large groups of people the constant plague of crashing does make SL appear as it is not really up to the job we require from it. How can we improve this? Better hardware? Our own central hosted version of SL? Better web bandwidth? >> We've focused a lot of work on improving stablity over the last 6 months. There are two parts to this issue: stability of the Second Life grid itself, which is much better than last fall, with only regular maintenance updates and occasional grid restarts. The other part is stability of the Second Life client. The most common problems are graphics-card related. See: http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php. Whenever possible, turning on system crash reports (in your preferences) helps give us information to improve client stability.
6) Do you have any special resources or contacts to help companies set up facilities in SL? >>Linden Lab provides support though the Concierge program for businesses that are buying and owning land and through the Developer Program for businesses that are creating their own content. In general, we recommend that businesses consider contracting with one of the many Developers who have experience in Second Life and can provide support, marketing, planning, and ongoing event, logistics and community support for your presence in Second Life: http://secondlife.com/developers/directory.php.