IBM's Social Computing group have published an interesting paper entitled "Acquiring a Professional 'Second Life': Problems and Prospects for the Use of Virtual Worlds in Business".  It details the trials that the group have done with a variety of business users and outlines both the issues met and the benefits to be had.  Rather like the Forterra 'Recipe For Success' paper that I wrote about, the most useful aspect are the user anecdotes and quotes.  For example "Comparing other technologies, big step up. Can probably adequately replace F2F for some tasks.", or "I really do think there's potential in using Second Life to collaborate in teams".  It's worth a read.

So just as my interest in Sun's Wonderland virtual world platform starts to really kick in, Oracle goes and buys Sun.  Now what?  Is it worth investing time building tools and solutions on Wonderland?  I don't expect Oracle to allow resources to continue to be devoted to the platform given the rather speculative nature of the technology and the lack of any kind of prospect for income from it in the near or even middle term.  But the virtual world community is one of the most enthusiastic and committed of any I've seen, so I'd venture that Wonderland might end up as a truly independent Open Source project, like OpenSim and, from an enterprise viewpoint, a better bet for collaboration. 
My growing interest in Wonderland has been triggered by the incredibly hackish ideas I've had to come up with to do useful collaborative things on the SecondLife/OpenSim platform.  For example, I've got prototype ideas for a scrollable in-world browser/document displayer for SL, but there's a lot of work required to achieve something that Wonderland just gives you via the X11 shared applications support.  Similarly, collaborating on say a spreadsheet or a text document in SL involves either rendering it as a bitmap and uploading it (automating the upload via a bot is also a hack but one I've already implemented),  working in an online equivalent like google docs or a decent collaborative online CMS, or using a desktop streaming client viewed using the QuickTime capabilities in SL.  Again Wonderland supports shared apps, so no issue (especially if you already use OpenOffice).
I've got a lot invested in tool development in SL, and for the moment it is still the most expressive and immersive platform, so I plan to continue working with SL but any spare time I get I'll be pushing Wonderland too.