(New York, NY and State College, PA) Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds: How to Create Cost-Saving, Efficient and Engaging Programs is to be published by McGraw-Hill in December, 2009. "Bound Book" date that signifies the end of the printing and start of shipments to the stores is set for December 11. It will appear in the stores 5 to 14 days later.

To be sure, there are good books on the subject of virtual worlds and Second Life. The problem is that they are concentrated on entertainment value, use by hobbyists or small businesses catering to those hobbyists. Moreover, many of the available articles and reports on the use of Second Life in corporate environment emphasize secondary, worthless, or even directly counterproductive aspects and miss important enterprise-related features.

The authors of the Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds for the first time ever assembled a unique team of contributors from the companies with real experience in virtual worlds. Experts from Cisco, EMC, IBM, Intel, Michelin, Microsoft, TMP Worldwide, University of Kansas Medical Center and World Bank hold nothing back frankly discussing their corporate Second Life projects, methodology, financials, timelines and results. The book sums up best practices and recommendations from real life corporate experiences in virtual worlds. Authors discuss everything you need to learn about the business uses of virtual worlds, with an emphasis on Second Life: what it is, what you need to start a successful program in Second Life or other virtual worlds, what to expect, and how these innovative environments are used by a variety of well-respected corporate players. They pay special attention to security issues and concerns, as well as real-life implementations and use of simulations to achieve competitive advantage and high ROI.

CEO of Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life provided a unique outlook on the Linden's approach to corporate users and the vector of future developments.

Virtual worlds develop fast; they change corporate training and HR even faster. To help business and training professionals keep up with the newest applications and best practices, authors maintain wiki at http://www.TheVirtualWorldsBook.com/wiki accessible exclusively to those who ordered the book.

You can find more information and pre-order the book on the web site at http://www.TheVirtualWorldsBook.com.