The party is still showing no signs of slowing down and this week we’re doing something very special for our members.
Open House at XING: All features – free of charge – for one week.

What’s open house?

All basic members on XING will be able to use all premium features for one whole week, completely free of charge and with no restrictions. All basic members can now write messages, finally find out who’s visited their profile and much much more.

So what are you waiting for? Make the most of open house on XING and start actively networking!

The small print: You don’t have to make any changes to your membership and there will be no costs incurred after the week is over. Enjoy!

Our birthday sweepstake: 78 great prizes up for grabs!

• 1 x MacBook Air
• 1 x Jura automatic coffee machine
• 2 x BlackBerry Curve 8900
• 3 x BlackBerry Curve 8520
• 5 x iPod shuffle
• 60 x 12-month XING Premium Membership

For a chance to win, just answer the question on our sweepstake page!

Our special birthday offer: Pay for 6 months, network for 8

From today onwards, we are offering a fantastically good-value way to go premium on XING: Sign up for a 6-month subscription and get two whole months on top for free! Click here to take advantage of this offer now.

The first groups went online on Christmas of 2003, and since then our members have been actively sharing information in them. At first we called them ‘networks’, but the naming conventions changed over time. Now individual discussion topics are grouped under categories known as ‘forums’, as is common online. Later, we launched another product, Private Clubs, which were derived from forums. Lars Hinrichs, founder of XING, had the following to say:

Urged on by a number of companies, we developed a customizable white label solution of our software and started distribution from July 2005 onwards. We realized though that this wasn’t completely in tune with our members’ interests and that continuing down this road would not be successful in the long term. Since then we have driven forward the expansion of our popular Groups functionality and introduced Enterprise Groups as a new home for companies on XING.

Urged on by a number of companies, we developed a customizable white label solution of our software and started distribution from July 2005 onwards. We realized, though, that this wasn’t completely in tune with our members’ interests and that continuing down this road would not be successful in the long term. Since then we have driven forward the expansion of our popular Groups functionality and introduced Enterprise Groups as a new home for companies on XING.We supplemented the original group product with Premium Groups, with an expanded feature set. Then, in November 2007, we granted Premium features to all groups, when we merged the two types of groups. For companies and large organizations, we have Enterprise Groups for setting up employee, alumni, or applicant communities and managing them effectively. Companies such as IBM, Microsoft, McKinsey and T-Systems have already set up networks using this product, creating groups with unique visual qualities and expanded functionalities.

Since 2007, we’ve had Official Regional XING Groups, which organize Official XING Events. Now there are over 200 Ambassadors for 140 Regional XING Ambassador Groups. in Berlin, Munich, Zürich, Ankara, Santiago de Chile, Oslo, and many more. …

Just a few weeks ago we launched XING Xpert Ambassador Groups (and had this to say about them).

The number of groups has been going up since they were launched: In January 2006 there were 2,500, in October 2007 over 7,600, in December 2008 we topped 22,000. At the end of 2008, the Turkish Cultural Club won the group logo context in which over 10,000 XING members took part. Now we have over 30,000 groups, and in preparation for the upcoming German elections political communities for the first time ever. Plus Xpert Ambassadors…

As you can see, XING groups are on the move – and I’m certain that it will stay that way. Looking forward to the next thousand or so groups…

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ll be launching the XING PARTNER ECOSYSTEM next week.

This major product launch will mark the first time that XING’s business partners are able to provide their own applications on the XING platform. This provides a huge benefit for XING’s members as our partners will compliment XING’s own applications with additional products and services made better by being delivered over the XING professional network.

We’re utilizing the OpenSocial platform for this launch and we’ll be launching a number of great partner applications next week.  Unique to XING, we’ll be launching a great mix of applications with broad global reach as well as applications with more local appeal to our core markets.

If you are an interested journalist or blogger, you are welcome to join us for an online news conference on the 22nd where details about the XING PARTNER ECOSYSTEM will be revealed in advance.  Please contact our press team for more information.

Even after the ineluctable experience of being stuck in the computer loop (”I’m sorry; I didn’t understand your answer. Using your touchtone phone…”), the truth remains: automated menus save time because they quickly connect you to the right person. At XING, we too know the truth of the maxim: the quicker we can find out what you want (to know), the faster we can respond appropriately.

Another step towards faster response times in Customer Service is improving our Help section, which we’re in the process of doing right now. A two-tiered system now allows for a better categorization of your request, meaning your support ticket will now arrive in the right set of hands even faster. And – it can now be processed even quicker.

More companies

When we introduced Company Profiles and our feedback tool UserVoice, we also promised to listen to your feedback, and implement it on demand more than ever before. We’re listening, and we’ve started to add the features and changes that are important to you. One of these is the possibility to register very small companies in our profile database. Because Company Profiles are not automatically created for small companies (two or more employees), we’re offering the option to create them on demand: click on the “My Company” page, and there you’ll have the option of adding your company, small though it may be. Presto!

Some things to keep in mind:

• Our company database will check to make sure that  at least two members have entered the same company, spelled the same way, into their profiles.
• For technical reasons, it can take up to 24 hours to create a profile.
• Average age and other data included with larger Company Profiles has been eliminated for small companies, as this would not yield usable results.

Furthermore, Company Pages now offer more information than before, and more opportunities for Premium Members to learn more, more quickly: when you move the cursor near a member photo, you now have the option of contacting this person, writing a message, or bookmarking the person, directly from the Company Profile page. Naturally, this new addition does not affect privacy settings: if you wish not to be contacted by non-contacts, nothing will change.

If you click on the personal profile of a member from a Company Page, the “Members who recently visited my profile” Powersearch page will now indicate this. Finally, we’ve perfected the statistic algorithms a bit.

Approach and results of introducing Scrum

In July 2007, a Senior Engineer from the then new Events 2.0 project team recommended implementing development using the Scrum approach. Although we were enthusiastic, we were not prepared. As is typical for XING, we quickly sought out an available ScrumMaster and began our Scrum experiment.

It soon became clear that we needed more expertise. Consequently, all project managers and several Lead Engineers participated in Scrum training sessions and became Certified  Scrum Masters. Thereafter the Product Owner were certified and later general workshops were held for team roles. All departments (engineering, project, product, and quality management) developed adapted processes and procedure models for the agile approach, and adjusted – fortunately for us only a few – formalisms. The actual conversion to the new rhythm – one to three-week development sprints and modified routines – improved with each successive sprint.

The Events project served as an initial test balloon. Second and third scrum projects followed then over the next few months. Now, most of our development projects are implemented using Scrum. We learned how to improve further with each new team and each new sprint. To accelerate the learning process, we have our integration status regularly examined by external Scrum practitioners, who provide valuable feedback. Internally, Scrum Masters meet weekly to discuss optimization and synthesize experiences from the various teams.

After nearly one year, we are implementing projects with improved routine and efficiency, but further optimization is necessary. For example, we are currently working on optimizing the integration of the Spanish development team. Still we note that our improvement potential is migrating from scrum integration difficulties to project related topics. Here we note also that Scrum is helpful – in ways similar to Lean Management – in recognizing and correcting problems earlier in the development process.

Our conclusion so far: Introducing Scrum is not easy and requires substantial modifications to the organization and product development processes. For us, it has already paid off because of the capability to react quickly and adeptly to dynamic requirements on our platform and better usage of our skill potentials. We feel well prepared as we look to the future.

Tens of thousands of members have been using the feature over the past few weeks and sending us valuable feedback on their initial responses and user experience. A massive thank you for this from the whole XING team! There’s good news to report too: The first features and changes to be made as a direct result of our feedback tool UserVoice are going live today. Here’s just a brief glimpse at some user-initiated changes.

• Employees who weren’t listed or were incorrectly classified on the Company Profiles can now confirm that they belong to a certain company with the help of a new button. One reason for this may be that you spelled the name of the company differently to others – but now one click is all it takes to solve the problem. The company name listed in the Company Profile will then replace the name of the employer currently displayed in your own profile. All you need to do is confirm this by clicking save, and you’ll be added to the list of company employees!
• We’ve also improved the algorithm used for generating Company Profiles. It now takes special characters into consideration when creating profiles, for instance. Several similar Company Profiles will also be consolidated into one if names only differ in terms of additional information added in brackets.
• Up until now, only the latest company entry in members’ profiles was taken into consideration when establishing the “Employee since” statistics for a Company Profile. Thanks to your feedback, we have now taken into account the fact that some users make new entries in their profile whenever they change position within the same company. All these entries will be included in the statistics from now on, provided the company name is spelled consistently in each case.
• The number of members per company profile is now also displayed in the list of search results.

So as you can see: Additional improvements are being worked on all the time, and there’s a lot more still to come too.

Make sure you take a look at our feedback tool for Company Profiles to keep up to speed on which new ideas, top ideas and hot ideas we’re currently reviewing and working on. And let us know what YOU think!

Today we are not only starting to gradually increase the number of members using the Company Profiles, we are also completing the first major optimizations of this feature based on your feedback. Besides these large steps: if you are a Premium Member and send messages to several contacts, you will be shown how many recipients you can still add. The main view of your messages has also been revised so that it aligns with the new header better.

Our challenges of introducing Scrum

The initial challenge was to understand Scrum within the entire company. When Scrum is misinterpreted as a project management method or process model similar to the spiral model, most of its advantages remain unused. A precursor of such an unfavorable condition is the retention of traditional project structures and planning methods. The challenges are therefore not in the complexity of processes, methodical approaches, or tools. The greater hurdle is to understand the agile values – as described in the Agile Manifesto – as well as the new principles (goodbye project management triangle!), and then implement new roles and responsibilities. These premises fundamentally alter portions of the product development process.

The knowledge and experience required for the new scrum roles often first appear to be incompatible with predominant job descriptions at a company. The repositioning of the central project manager as the Scrum Master (organizational expertise for the team and the processes) as well as the entrepreneurial role of the Product Owner (responsible for goal, budget, and priority allocation) must first be accepted and internalized. The willingness of management and employees to implement these changes and further share responsibilities is absolutely essential. To function properly, this requires a corporate culture that can adhere in principle to the Agile Manifesto.

Technical optimization was also necessary, even though XING had already published products and features each week prior to introducing Scrum. Our project team infrastructure and routines were not designed to publish weekly completed code within a project without loss of productivity. We had to make several adjustments and modify our work processes and tools ­- for example, aspects of our quality assurance and release management procedures and infrastructure.

The final section describes our approach for introducing Scrum and the results up to this point.