5. Try getting "land" and "building" within Second Life.
You'll need a premium account, which costs at least $9.95 per month; you can "Rent" some land in the main Second Life space, or get an "island" (private region). Land has initial and monthly costs.

6. Try deploying a Second Life-type environment internally on a server inside your network.
Use the free OpenSim Open Simulator server. Also be sure to check out open-source code available through SourceForge (search on "Second Life" and on "Virtual World").

7. Explore more of today's collaborative tools.
"Web 2.0" tools like presence-based tools like instant messaging (IM), "Facebook"-type organizers, blogs, wikis...the odds are, many, if not most, of your new employees came in using consumer versions of these tools, and many people are probably using them informally for company activity.

Enterprise collaborative tools will include security, archiving and other features that IT and the company proper need. If you're using Microsoft Office Live or IBM Sametime, you may already have many of these, in fact.

Qwaq's Forums let you create a virtual meeting space, in which you can "import" your working materials, and costs $60 per person per month for use of its hosted service.

8. Identify resources for next steps.
Second Life's Solutions Provider Directory lists companies that can help you do a small project, like integrating one of your management applications—or create an entire "island."

9. Explore alternatives to Second Life technology, e.g.:

• Project Wonderland, a toolkit for Building 3D Virtual Worlds, sponsored by Sun Microsystems,
• Forterra Systems Inc.'s secure dedicated On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE) platform and
• IBM's Project BlueGrass

"It's time to get involved, to get used to the issues, the programming concerns," advises Clear Ink's Nelson.

10. Be patient.
This year, virtual-world operations centers will be expensive to create and won't be provably mission-critical reliable. However, within the next year or two, "virtual world as management interface" should get closer to reality, as a) more APIs and virtual-world representations of are built, b) the client and server software gets more provably reliable, and c) client software that can provide scaled-down access for less powerful computers and for handhelds and smartphones, becomes available.

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer based in Newton Center, MA. His website is www.dern.com and his technology blog is TryingTechnology.com.