Tek4L

I had a first look at Sun’s project wonderland last week. It is nothing staggering at first look to anyone that has been playing in Second Life, but it has some nice features like the immersive 3D audio, and the ability to hang applications like web browsers and open office docs on the wall and share them with other users. There is also the ability to bring in the real world via audio and video conferencing.

Hopefully we can get our own wonderland server up and running in the next few weeks so we can do some more detailed investigation of its potential in the educational space.

The only drawback at the moment is a lack of Mac support due to the client requiring Java 1.6, and this currently isn’t available for Mac  - but hopefully will be soon.

I have been busy investigating email and calendaring solutions for Core Education, the non-profit educational research organisation that I work for. The big question is do we go for the all in one PIM solution, or take the web 2.0 - many small pieces losely joined approached.

For the first option Exchange is out of the question so I have been playing around with Zimbra. It seems very good, and synchs with MS and Apple desktops, as well as having a very good ajax web interface and desktop client. We already have a stable email platform, and it is really just the calendaring component of Zimbra that we want, so is it worth all the drama of having to migrate all of our email accounts?

The other option I am looking at is keeping our existing email platform and using Google Calendar for group calendaring. I am hoping to trial this option with a few staff in the next week or so - will keep you posted ….