Second Life update

It’s been about 3 months since we launched our presence in Second Life. Since our launch at UGS Innovation Connection alot has happened, both in RL and SL. Our acquisition by Siemens was closed and we have updated our island identity to reflect our new corporate situation. The number of visitors is staying fairly steady and we are getting a wide variety of backgrounds. Some that know and use UGS products and some that have never heard of CAD, PLM or any of the other TLAs we throw around. A lot of internal users have jumped into the fray and are thinking up all kinds of ways to use SL to connect with our users, connect to our products and connect with each other.
Most of all we are accomplishing what we set out to do: learn. We have learned that you need to have people in SL to make it work. Standing up an island like you would a WWW site and letting people walk through it doesn’t get anyone very far (the users or the company). It’s the social aspect of SL that makes it unique. So we’re going about putting in office hours for our band of volunteers internal users to let people know when and where someone will be there to engage with.
We’ve learned that letting people create something in your space is more interesting to residents than just telling them a story. So add another change from the www paradigm: it’s not just read, it’s read/write. So we’re adding a lot of interactive capabilities to our island. You’ll be able to experience what it’s like to use our tools, not just have us tell you what it’s like to use them.
So despite some reports to the contrary, we are very happy with Innovation Connection Island so far. We’re engaged with a community that is by it’s nature prone to work in 3D and they’re pretty gracious about telling us what they want.