Mireille shot a little movie all about XING recently. It's entertaining to watch, and not only for the XING team either. You can catch a glimpse of our ever growing office, our team, our international culture, even the way we spend our lunch breaks. The movie was also used to present XING at the Rails Konferenz 2008 this week. A big thank you to Mireille and all the "actors"!

Link: sevenload.com

Kate Lu is Marketing Manager for XING China and today she shares her "Piece of XING" with us. (click on the image to enlarge)

The XING team is gearing up for the Euro 2008 football tournament and has a separate contest all of its own going on: Which patriotic team member has the most impressive desk decorations in support of their home country’s football team? Take a look at some of our fan gear:

The orange lamp decoration is cheering on the Netherlands, by the way. Spot the odd one out: Which of the countries shown doesn’t have a team competing in Euro 2008?

Now it´s Ralf´s turn to introduce his department. (click on the image to enlarge)

Esther from our Barcelona office says: After completing the migration, we packed up our PCs, tables and chairs, locked the old office doors one last time and went purposefully to The new XING office in Barcelona.

Several weeks have already passed since we moved to this sunny and well located office. There are still some boxes to unpack, but we are already working hard to improve our workspace. Step by step we have everything we need to get going, so now it's time for us to share our adventure with all of you.

The good news is: we now have a faster Internet connection, the wooden technical floor is now covered by a pretty gray carpet and the coffee machine is steaming. I might say that some of us have waited anxiously for this basic device! Needless to say, beginnings have never been easy, but we have overcome it with a lot of enthusiasm.

We love being here and we invite you all to visit us: our door is open! ;)

¡El equipo de XING España estrena oficina en Barcelona!

Una vez finalizada la Migración empezamos a empaquetar nuestros PC´s, mesas y sillas, y nos dirigimos a nuestro destino: "las nuevas oficinas de XING en Barcelona".
Han transcurrido varias semanas desde que nos instalamos en esta soleada y céntrica oficina. Todavía quedan algunas cajas por desempaquetar y pequeños detalles para crear nuestro propio espacio de trabajo, pero poco a poco todo avanza y nos apetece mucho compartirlo con vosotros.

Últimas novedades desde Barcelona: nuestra conexión a Internet es más rápida, el suelo está cubierto por una bonita moqueta gris y la máquina de café no para de echar humo, para algunos de nosotros la llegada de este pequeño aparato ha supuesto una gran diferencia!! Qué más decir, los comienzos nunca han sido fáciles pero hemos afrontado el reto con mucha ilusión.

 Nos encanta estar aquí y os invitamos a visitarnos: La puerta está abierta para todos ;)

Today Nelly - our Country Manager for GCC - describe her "Piece of XING"  far away from Hamburg. (click on the image to enlarge)

Forget about “Google7”, there’s nothing more dangerous for your sweet tooth and your sporty figure than working at XING!

It somehow became a nice tradition that every now and then XING’s birthday girls and boys bring some cake along to the office to celebrate their special day with us. And the good thing is that as our team has grown and grown over the past four years, the number of birthdays has of course increased too. Yay! On the other hand I have to admit it’s pretty hard to resist the temptation and the yummy smell of a delicious cake at 9:30am.

We´re looking to even more birthday boys and girls. Take a look at our job offers ;)

The XING team is looking forward to yet more office space: Over the coming weeks, among others the ‚Product’ and ‚Engineering’ departments will be packing up their Mac´s and PC´s and moving to their brand new home in these renovated rooms on the fifth floor of our Hamburg head office. Looks like a floorwarming party ahead ;)

This Tuesday Felix gives us an impression of his "Piece of XING". (click on the image to enlarge)

And today Dagmar shares her "Piece of cake XING" with us. (click on the image to enlarge)

This week we welcomed Caglar and Nihan in the office, our new colleagues from Istanbul. They are the joint Founders and CEOs of cember.net, the Turkish business network recently acquired by XING AG. They came to Hamburg for two days – a trip jam-packed with meetings and events aimed at getting to know the whole XING team on both a professional and personal level, finding out all about the workings of individual departments and exchanging ideas on current and future tasks. We’ve all enjoyed these busy days, and we feel very fortunate that we have found such competent and likeable new additions to the ever-growing XING family.

Caglar and Nihan are a married couple who basically built up the cember.net platform all on their own. They both have a background in engineering and have also both lived in Germany for a couple of years, having worked for Accenture. So it is an added bonus that speak fluent English AND almost perfect German! They came across openBC whilst they were living in Germany and immediately recognized the potential for a similar service in their native country. The rest, as they say, is history - cember.net became the largest professional network of its kind in Turkey.

In the past marathon of meetings, every department, from Marketing to Community Relations to Engineering, all took the opportunity to sit down with the two Founders, introduce their work and learn as much as possible about the Turkish market. Caglar and Nihan will support the integration of cember.net with XING, as well as supporting the Turkish community with a small team on behalf of XING and continuing to promote strong growth. 

Thursday culminated in a Turkish night at the XING office: We celebrated the arrival of our newcomers with traditional Turkish food, Turkish music and decorations. A great time was had by all, and it turns out that Caglar was also able to beat the XING table soccer king!

On this Friday Angela tell us a little bit about  her piece of XING. (click on the image to enlarge)

Today Christine & Katharina are happy to share their "My Piece of XING".

(click to enlarge)

Now it´s Sönkes turn to introduce his department (click on the image to enlarge).

This week, Tobias from Finance is up (click on the image to enlarge). He'll introduce his team.

This week we would like to introduce the Community Relations department - let's hear about Silke's piece of XING (click to enlarge):

Last week, we met Ruth from the TLC department. Now we'll hear a little bit about Karsten and his "Piece of XING" (click to enlarge).

From now on you’ll be able to read a new installment from the “My Piece of XING” article series every week. XING members will be introducing themselves and their departments in this new blog series. They’ll be giving an insight into our daily work and their lives with, at and outside of XING.

Ruth is kicking off, showcasing her “Piece of XING” here...(click to enlarge)

Thanks to the significant growth of our company we have won the Rising Star Award (2. Place) of Deloitte. It was a very nice event hosted in Frankfurt Zoo Palais. And we had a great winning table with Dr. Florian Holzapfel (Q-Cells), Hans-Martin Rüter (Conergy), Jörg Tesch (Deloitte Hamburg), Jörg Ohlsen (Deloitte Hamburg), Heiko Hubertz (Big Point).
 

Once again CYQUEST organized the fabulous NetSoccer Beach Clash (NSBC). This time the event took place at Veritas Beach, a location close to Hamburg. Participating Teams were: xcontrol, CoreMedia, cruisr.de, Alice/Hansenet, Travanto + Uhrzeit.org, XING, Freenet, Fluxx, AOL, TIPP24, Name Drive LLC, Faktor3, Lovells, CYQUEST, Libri.de, freiheit.com, Common Visions, Ynnor Systems, Advertising.com, StudiVZ, suesswarenversand.de, Google, Cellity, hamburg[at]work, eProfessional/Zanox.

Our team and the XING cheerleaders did an amazing series and won this years trophy! Congratulation to this success. XING scored victories against Fluxx, Google, AOL, Uhrzeit.org and lost only one match to Freenet in the prelims. 

I am really proud of our team, the team spirit and ability to party we share at XING. If you want to join our team check out the marketplace with current open positions.

Our winning team: Daniel (Danger), Nils, Sönke, Timo, Felix, Nuno, Nelo, Timo, Fabian, Stefan and Toni. Not in the picture: Johannes

Kick it like Timo!

On saturday Timo and his team will slame the balls into the net and will give veteran´s eleven 1. FC Nürnberg a good dressing down. ..tickets are still available and the weather forecast sounds bombastic.

See you!

We have been using a video conferencing system to connect with our team in Zurich for quite a while now. And just recently we've discovered how well it works for China too. It still feels like a miracle of modern technology to not only to hear but also see your colleagues on the other side of the world and actually take part in the same real-time, face-to-face meeting. Here you can see Country Manager Dr. Xinyu Song and his team listening to Sönke from BizDev in Hamburg, Germany. The photo was taken during our last company meeting. 

With our team becoming more and more international, I guess we will be using our video conferencing system more extensively in the future. Can’t wait to welcome our team from Spain on the screen.

Today, once again, we’re afflicted with a service outage at the hands of our payment provider, GlobalCollect. As this is not the first such outage, I feel that we should be more vocal about the quality of service they provide us.

From the web site:

"GlobalCollect is the leading Payment Service Provider of local payment solutions for international businesses. For each of our clients, we offer the highest service level that includes a dedicated team who thrives to optimize your payment strategy. This optimization will significantly contribute to increasing your sales and reducing risk. GlobalCollect is a real partner offering a full service that is uniquely in a class of its own."

               
OK - now it’s time to wake up and face reality. One hour after(!) the start of the outage, GlobalCollect sent us an automated email to inform us of the down time. Right now, GlobalCollect “service” has been out of operation for almost five hours during our prime time. Calls made to the GlobalCollect "dedicated" team on a so-called emergency number are answered by a clueless call center agent who promises a callback we have yet to receive. Calls made to the GlobalCollect office are put through to a very friendly receptionist who explains that all servers are down and that no one can answer our calls. Amazingly, it seems that there is not a single soul at GlobalCollect who can provide us with the slightest bit of information about the outage, while in the meantime our company’s business model was at a standstill.

This is totally unacceptable for any serious business relationship, and we at XING are not willing to tolerate this any more. We won't be satisfied with a letter from GlobalCollect pointing to their Internet provider as a scapegoat. By paying for your service, XING expects - at the very least - that GlobalCollect have redundant network connections, if not redundant data centers. For our part, we will definitely be looking for an additional payment service provider.

Update 1: 15.2.07 3pm
We just got a very kind message from Ron Vollebregt (Chief Operating Officer, Co-founder and co-owner of  GlobalCollect):

We fully understand your frustration and we take full  responsibility for the problems regardless of where and how they were caused. Fact is that we have redundancy throughout our platform (incl dual sites) but that for some as yet unidentified reason, failover mechanisms didn't work. I have asked Pieter Stal to contact you to discuss the consequences.

Update 2: 16.2.07 6pm
We got a very friendly "we are sorry" message from Ron today saying the error was at their provider CSC. They promise to look into increasing redundancy. We will see, if we have problems again. In the end, I don't care about their provider having problems, it is Global Collects duty have have at least redundancy.

WebCollect has proven to be a stable platform over the years, includes an SLA of 99.9%, and has been successfully processing millions of transactions per month. The platform is hosted by our preferred supplier CSC. The company is one of the world’s largest hosting providers, is stock listed, and has an impressive track record. Despite this, their professional and secure hosting facility located in Copenhagen, had a full outage of their entire datacenter on Saturday February 10th and Thursday, February 15th.  The outage not only affected GlobalCollect, but also all of CSC’s other clients from payment processors to traffic control centers, BASF/Shell and SAS.

Let there be no misunderstanding that as your payment service provider, GlobalCollect feels responsible for the recent events that have taken place. The nature and frequency of the incidents are unacceptable to all of us, and we will make sure that analysis of these events will be used to properly prevent outages in the future. In the meantime, we are investigating additional hosting partners to further increase redundancy.

Daniela says

On top a team from Monolux arrived interviewing Lars about networking and  several things.

update: the interview will be broadcast already 27 November at 9:30pm. Afterwards you can watch it here.

Karsten did some last minute HTML corrections. Still some minutes to wait until we are live with XING.

Some more final beta testing impressions. German-speaking bug hunters in action.

Bugs...bugs...bugs...

Before and after: Svens´ resumee. And I just heard that epublica closed all bug tickets tonight.

Lars in interview.

epublica rolled up their sleeves and we are on time.

Special thanks to Daniel (Mr. Admin) ;)

Sven Wiesner did a fabulous and entertaining blog post about the XING bug test-party last night. Watch his video and listen to the beat.

Join the blog parade here.

Today we are beta testing the new XING-Platform. Keep you posted!

This amazing picture was taken by our VP Engineering. Now I know where his best coding ideas are coming from ;-D

In the meanwhile we are working under pressure to finalise everything for the upcoming launch of XING. I know that some of you already realised the nice eye catcher on openBCs`s upper left corner.

But it´s not only us who are doing nightshifts at the moment. The whole team is looking forward testing the platform within a few days. It will be fun, and I will blog about it!

Daniela has been defining a new level of work intensity with her team in conjunction with the current media news and the upcomXING activities.

Everyone is going full steam ahead on so many fronts and I am really impressed to see how the whole team is making so many extra efforts.

The attention is also leading to some interesting new sights around the office such as Lars here getting in a few last emails before going on camera.

Mind you I think the workload might be getting to some of us...

Just kidding, obviously we have retained our sense of humor (that or we just hired Borat) :-) and
personally I am excited.

Today there were obviously frictions both within the openBC community and between openBC and members of that community.

It is difficult to know what to say especially since there are so many different accusations flying some of which are directed particularly at our staff. I suppose we should not let the facts get in the way of a good argument and yet the feeling this end is one of bewilderment as we value our communities and hold ourselves to a high standard of service.

So for the record I apologies on behalf of the team for any confusion in the groups and I committ to investigating what is going on and to, if possible, solving it in an amicable fashion.

PS: I was impressed by the open communication I´ve received today and want to continue in that spirit.

Ok, we didn´t win the netsoccer beach clash award last weekend, but at least we´ve beaten the winner of the last 2 years: ebay/skype! 3:0! But the good news doesn´t stop there: we´ve made it into the quarter finals. Hardened by our ac the freezing cold and rainy weather couldn´t sap our energy. Far from it!  And although we had 3 injured, we all entered the bar just in time for the party to start. :)

more pics