One of the criticisms levelled at Second Life by respondents to most of the snapshot surveys is that security is compromised at the firewall level; in addition, it would be nice to create and control an environment ‘locally’. These issues have helped persuade several groups in UK universities to experiment with OpenSim.

The following announcement, lifted from the Second Life blog, is therefore intriguing. Hopefully, someone in UK Higher or Further Education will evaluate this particular variance of Second Life and come up with some findings; VWW will be happy to help disseminate any results:

In April, we announced that “Second Life Lives Behind a Firewall,” and that our new product was in Alpha. Since that time, the Enterprise Team has been hard at work evolving and deploying our software into many organizations–both as an Alpha and closed Beta. Now, I’m proud and excited to share that we’re ready to announce general availability of the Beta product next week.

On Wednesday, November 4th at 11:15 am – 12:00 pm PST, Doug Thompson (SL: Dusan Writer) will moderate a mixed-reality panel at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco and Metanomics inworld with Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab’s CEO, Neil Katz, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director IBM Virtual Spaces, CIO Office Innovation Initiatives, Steve Aguiar, Program Manager at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s (NUWC’s) Metaverse Strategic Initiative, and Douglas Maxwell, Program Technology Lead also at NUWC’s Metaverse Strategic Initiative.

As shared on the Metanomics site,

“Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, will unveil “Nebraska”, a stand-alone solution based on the technology that runs the popular Second Life virtual world. “Nebraska” is the much-anticipated behind-the-firewall solution which will allow enterprise to host their own virtual world environments within their organizations. Mark will talk about the benefits of the platform, the intended audience, and how it fits into the broader challenges and opportunities of “enterprise 2.0”. Mark will be joined by a number of customers who have used Nebraska during the closed beta phase of development. The panel will explore the benefits, lessons learned, barriers and opportunities which arise from integrating virtual world solutions into the enterprise.The event will include panelists appearing live in San Francisco and others who will join from the Metanomics Main Stage in Second Life.”

So, mark your calendars and come join us–physically in San Francisco at Enterprise 2.0 or virtually on Metanomics that will also include a webstream, courtesy of Treet.tv, starting a bit earlier at 11:00 am.

For additional details, check out the Metanomics site.