Legal Research

Qwaq: Second Life for the enterprise

By Jason

The May issue of Smart Libraries had an interesting article about Qwaq Forums, a virtual space for organizations.

Many companies have been exploring the use of virtual worlds like Second Life to connect with customers, and some have even used it for virtual meeting spaces. Many libraries have held training sessions and events at virtual libraries in Second Life.

Qwaq seems to be taking the concept of virtual worlds and applying it to an office environment. They offer virtual meeting spaces, training sessions, and even virtual offices. Their selling point over investing in their services over using second life is security. They seem to be aiming their services at organizations with the need to connect multiple remote offices, telecommuters, and for secure B2B collaboration.

I know that some organizations have found some success in Second Life, but I wonder if these virtual worlds offer significant advantages over other types of business collaboration software. For example, many law firms have the need to collaboratively work on documents across different offices, or with attorneys for separate firms or in-house counsel at corporations. There are a variety of solutions which allow real-time document collaboration. Will virtual office spaces like Qwaq offer something significantly better or more effective than the current solutions on the market?

Just looking at the screen shots makes me think that document collaboration under these settings may take a significant amount of getting used to, especially for attorneys who might be used to flat, text-based document collaboration. I’m interested to see if this trend for virtual worlds in the enterprises catches on, and how it affects business communications in the future.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on June 10, 2008 (boomark / email).