3D worlds offer many interesting options for professional
usage.
Like we saw in earlier periods of the innovation cycle,
companies showed an initial interest in Second Life® - but
barely made use of it besides R&D, marketing and training
environments - the problem was essentially that Second Life
itself was not really "business friendly".
The SL community is typically a group of people escaping
from their daily business and working lives, using it
as vehicle for living out their obscure fantasies from behind
their 3d goggles - clearly this is not a great environment to
fulfill business requirements. An important thing to
establish is the difference between the community itself and
the the technology platform. Let's face it, 3d is fun and the
community aspects are fun as well, but it's not really acceptable
if you are holding a training session and a bunch mad people
in chicken costumes suddenly rush in to join the
party (to pick a random example).
If however you seperate the technology from the community and
apply it to specific business scenarios it starts to become a very
interesting proposition - especially in the context of open source
- it suddenly unlocks the true potential of 3d environments in
enterprise applications without incurring the massive
start-up costs of developing such an environment from scratch. This
is a good thing.
The technology is fascinating, it is accepted that CTO,
CIO and CEO´s are interested and willing to learn more -
however, the 3D industry has to better understand and accept
needs and operating environments of their end-users.
To gain a better understanding of this, lets compare the
"typical" operating environments of a private and
corporate users:
| |
Private
user |
Corporate
User |
| Technical
Environment |
- 1-19 user per DSL, mostly only 1 or 2 3D user.
- fixed or temporary IP-address
- usually no further routing or secondary firewall after
Router
- high bandwidth per user (tip. 4Mbit and more downstream)
- changes at Computer and Router/Firewall easily possible
- no rules to follow
- hardware is obtained on a needed basis / as budget allows
|
- 50 to 1500 user typically per location
- one to several fixed IP's and access routes to the
internet
- usually 2-stage firewalling , in many cases subnetting and
routing in the corporate LAN/MAN/WAN
- low bandwidth per user (2 to 10 Mbit per 100 User tip.)
- ad hoc changes at Computer and/or router or Antivirus are
usually impossible
- changes, roll out etc must follow defined processes
- hardware has lifecycles (3 to 5 years for regular workstations
tip.)
|
Cost...
While most people think, that an IT department´s costs are
mainly based on hard- & software - this is a common
mis-conception. Labour cost is usually the highest item on
the balance sheet, and will likely remain so until they have
devised outsourcing strategies and migrated in-house resource
drains over to SaaS and the Cloud. That means, that all things that
"need to be done" count. In a proper organized IT, it is not
a problem to get a budget for a project that saves cost (by virtual
meetings), helps to qualify or boost sales. But you need to prepare
for the question of total cost of ownership. Telling the CIO, that
you have a high innovative product with monthly updates of an .exe
file with no .msi available maybe leads to an early end, if you
think about frequent viewer updates.
From the cost view of hard- and software we know now, that not
buying those is expensive, but moving data/software/setting from
one hardware or software product to the next. Therefore companies
have a lifecycle management. Be prepared to find workstation
up to 5 years old - and not to get a new .Net Framework release
without a prior change and release process.
Central software distribution and central configuration are
standards in IT operations, as are hard- and software
lifecycles. Besides cost, it is even better to understand the
customers business and know to get higher revenue instead of lower
cost. There is a upcoming place for deployment thoughts in
development and specialists in projects.
Networking
Application server (like opensim, realxtend ...) must strictly
follow internet protocol standards, namely TCP, IP, UDP, NAT(T),
DNS etc. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Traversal
)
Viewer must meet the same standards
Accepted connections must work on address translation (NAT-T,
even the voice implementation), on 3G networks like UMTS and on low
bandwidth (maybe with lower resolution).
Each project should define the supported network scenarios based
on the expected user - and implement tests on this base, maybe even
with volunteers.
Governance
For a company it is required (for bigger companies in most
country even by law) to have governance about the organization. By
that way, the IT must define rules and standards, must enforce and
control them. That means, that introducing a new technology
involves a clear description of the needs (hardware, software
requirements - bandwidth, routing and firewalling, local right for
installation and usage etc), so that the companies CSO, CIO or
people in charge can decide how this fits in their local
regulations - or if they could be adjusted.
If you develop a product intended to be implemented "as is" or
with small changes, seek contact to experts in governance, ISMS or
the CISO of the customer.
Security
Security has to be seen as a more detailed layer for
governance.
Security in modern definitions includes confidentiality,
integrity and availability. Seems simple - but if an application
does communicate via the internet, which involves several
thoughts:
- confidential data (login) must be encrypted (https far the best
w respect to usability)
- if the application allows up/downloads, this must be
controllable via firewall or configuration
- it must be sure, that a denial of service (at least for other
services) is unlikely
- if there are embedded applications (remote desktop sharing,
multimedia) this must be transparent and respect the companies rule
set
The standard regarding security (ISO 27.00x) has many facet's,
but at least opensim and rex are on a pretty good way. If you think
e.g. about provisioning, a central user database is no big deal.
Opensim is based on a regular SQL-database, so connecting systems
is fairly simple.
A huge problem at the moment would be the need for proper
firewall rules. Usualy a firewall rule is made of 3 components at
the design level (wheile the tech firewall gurus could do more):
source - port - destination. you want to lock down at least 2
of it. with opensim, rex and other beeing a 3D web, we
can´t say much about the destiantion. as a company admin you
can definge the range from source IP´s. But since we
have no standard port and private people operate ~20 to 40 regions
on one IP with self defined ports, this is a possible
showstopper.
- Just one step below corporate or IT governance, ISMS experts
will still answer most questions - while CIO, CSO, CISO are the
postions to contact.
Youth protection
This is maybe the easiest question with opensim/rex giving the
option to host your own server; a company can make sure there are
no sexual or other critical content offers.
Platform
There is no real platform requirement. In today's world, most
companies have windows and linux server, some even mixed
workstations. However, linux is a big advantage when
introducing a new product with different sourcing scenarios and
to-be-developed use cases, because it frees from some complex
licensing questions. If you prepare a ready-made solution in
a virtual machine, that would need a Windows Client license inside.
If a service provider would decide to host regions for customers on
windows - he would need a special partnership with Microsoft and
rent out SPLA licenses. That does not make the market start easier,
so a dual platform strategy is here at least the best start.
Sourcing scenarios
IT is as long as I remember a ping pong game between local and
central solutions. That is not done just for fun, but for ever
changing cost situations. The new emerging 3D technology based on
the common open source products has big advantages in this
field. Hosted offers (maybe specialized region hoster) are as
possible as "on demand" solutions like Labsi´s SIM on demand
- as well as on premises solutions.
Conclusion...
Are there rules to look at, thinking about global best
practices?
Messing around with 3D stuff is lots of fun at home where you
have complete control over your environment and typically "better"
computers with nice graphics cards and lots of ram and the like,
however as soon as we start looking at bringing 3D solutions into
the enterprise we have to start considering the typical constraints
that enterprise users will endure. We will look into these
restraints over the coming weeks in more detail but felt this might
be a useful starting point for considering the issues.
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