XING holds regular innovation weeks that give our developers an opportunity to tinker around with things and put their ideas into practice. Some of the results of these projects include things like the RSS import feature allowing you to import blog posts and to share them with your XING network. Now we’re happy to present you with another great innovation weeks feature that’s available from today. This feature allows you to use XING with keyboard shortcuts as you’ve most probably come across before in your daily work on the computer. This of course makes it both easier and faster to network on XING.

Here’s how it works
Keyboard shortcuts usually involve pressing and holding either the CTRL key if you’re a Windows user or CMD if you’re on a Mac. We don’t want to interfere with your browser’s own shortcuts, however, that  is why our shortcuts always start by pressing and holding the SHIFT key. (more…)

Our annual Prototyping Days event gives every employee the opportunity to turn his or her vision of XING into reality. Project teams consisting of people from every corner of the company put aside their usual work and get together for three days to work on projects they came up with. At the end of the events, the entire company gets together with the project teams presenting the results of their work. But coming up with great ideas isn’t just fun, it’s also a major benefit for the company, too!

The top 8 reasons to work at XING
Our project looked at how we can provide the best-possible networking experience in the future. My seven project teammates and I didn’t just want to use the Prototyping Days 2012 event to look into the future, we wanted to focus on what drives XING, i.e. its employees. Our aim was to show why we’re so passionate about XING and why we love working here. Our personal contribution as just a few of the 520 employees was a video we made that presents the top 8 reasons to work at XING.

Our team consisted of people from the Technology, Customer Relations and Product teams. The video went through its baptism of fire at the presentation session and passed with flying colors. In fact we won the Best Spirit Award for our efforts. But let’s face it – we got our Executive Board to crawl under the table soccer table, so I’m sure we deserved to win )

Want to feel XING’s positive vibes for yourself? Just join the team!!

What could the future of online business networking look like? What do we need to do to provide the best-possible networking experience? How would XING need to evolve to achieve that goal? These were just some of the questions the 520 employees at XING tackled during the XING Prototyping Days 2012 event.

As was the case last year, every employee–from the customer support through to marketing and product teams–had three days’ time to put aside their usual work and get together with other people to work on developing a specific idea.

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Update, Monday, 7.29 p.m.: Our search feature is up and running again! We apologize in advance if you experience any further difficulties. You may also encounter a few performance problems on certain parts of the platform, but please be assured that our team is working at full speed to ensure full reliability as soon as possible. We’ll also keep you posted with the latest developments.

Update, Monday, 9.44 a.m.: We’re currently experiencing a couple of faults on the platform. But don’t worry – our team are working hard to make sure that everything is up and running again as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you and will of course you informed with the latest information.

Update, Sunday, 5.39 a.m.: Step two of the expansion of our data center infrastructure is done. XING is up and running again. Thanks for your patience. Currently we are fixing the search function.

In order to make sure that XING can continue growing in the future, we recently started to expand our data center infrastructure. This Saturday (November 19) we’re carrying out step 2 so from 10 p.m. onwards, XING will be offline for a few hours. But don’t worry – we’ll be working at full speed to get the platform up and running again as soon as possible.

To get the latest during the downtime, just follow us on Twitter @xing_com.

XING has grown a lot over the last eight years and we intend to continue growing so we need to expand the capacity of our data center infrastructure. In order to do that, we need to close down the platform from 10 p.m. this Saturday. We expect the work to last for a few hours, but will be working at full speed. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

For more information, please follow the tweets posted by our Twitter account @XING_com.

Jens Pape, CTO XING AG

Prototyping on the roof. (Photo: Moritz Königsbuscher.)

From Wednesday to Friday last week, the XING office was turned on its head as staff from around the entire company joined forces to work on the XING Prototyping Days!

At this point, you may well be asking yourself, what are the Prototyping Days? Well, they’re an opportunity for everyone in the company – from HR through to customer support and on to QA – to take three days out from their usual work to get involved in a project of their choice, be it alone or as a team. Around forty projects were put forward, with people signing up to projects they found interesting.

The idea behind the Prototyping Days was to develop visions to help shape the future of business networking in the year 2015 by coming up with prototypes, pre-alpha versions, or even just a concept. (more…)

In the last few days we’ve received a number of messages from members in China complaining that our platform is unavailable or only available sporadically. We have of course looked into the situation and can now exclude this being down to technical issues. We can only assume that our platform is being blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.

We have already commissioned our lawyers in China to take action, although they’re currently skeptical as to whether our 500,000 members in China will be able to access the platform again. Our next move is to contact the German authorities to see if we can use “diplomatic” channels to help provide our members in China with access to the XING platform. We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

Some of you at the dmexco may have had a sneak preview of our new TV commercial, XING’s first-ever advertising foray onto the small screen. It’s premiering this evening and will run right through to mid-October on n-tv, N24, Eurosport, SAT.1, RTL, ProSieben and a host of other private channels. We’re also launching an online banner campaign today to accompany the TV ad, which will run for the next few months.

Why TV? Well, we’ve done our homework and discovered that while some industries have a very strong presence on XING, professional networking hasn’t really taken up root to the same extent in other sectors. It is these target groups in particular that we aim to reach out to with our TV campaign, by spreading the word about the benefits of XING for people’s daily working lives. (more…)

You’ve probably experienced something similar in the past while using the XING platform – certain areas you were well acquainted with suddenly looked completely different. Perhaps an input field had moved, a button name had changed, or the site had been redesigned? Perhaps tomorrow things will be back to how they were in the past. What’s going on? Some areas may even look completely different on a colleague’s screen to yours. What’s that all about? Is it some kind of half-baked design or poorly designed bananaware intended to come of age when with the customer? No, you’re not even close.

So what exactly is it then?

As is customary within our industry, we perform so-called A/B tests on various parts of our platform, meaning that one group of XING users (A) sees a certain interface or function while a control group (B) is presented with a variant offering the same functionality but with different visuals. There is no opt-in or opt-out – the system assigns users to the groups, everything else would lead to inconsistent test results. (more…)

Here at XING, agile software development in the form of SCRUM and Kanban has already proven successful. I wanted to use this experience to find out whether ‘agile work’ can be transferred to our internal IT system using Kanban, covering mail server maintenance tasks through to ad hoc support for staff with notebook issues.

The Kanban principle means that the team takes on tasks which are then handled by more than one team member. Our developers call this form of teamwork ‘pair programming’, which we have used to coin the term ‘pair doing’. (more…)