ZCOPE Blog

ZCOPE among the first XING-App Partners

Finally we may tell you about it: ZCOPE is one of the first XING Open social applications. And we‘re so far the only partner from Austria!

This really makes us proud! ;-)

The last weeks and months were very busy here in the ZCOPE office. Besides the normals tasks for our releases the connection to XING was developed. Despite their speedy fingers, our team sacrificed some evenings and weekends.

And how does it work?
XING users activate ZCOPE and may start right away: projects are created on XING, the team members are choosen among the own XING contacts. The project management then happens on the ZCOPE platform.

Here‘s a short interview with the ZCOPE team (Bernd Hepberger, project manager and Rainer Schönherr, CTO):

When did you hear about the Open Social-activities of XING?
Bernd: We proactively asked XING if they plan the integration of third parties. We were at the right place on the right time, because XING indeed started to integrate Open Social. After an evaluation phase we were selected for the first group to be launched.

What was the idea behind becoming a XING-App partner?
Bernd: XING is a very interesting platform for us as it‘s located in the business environment. That‘s exactly our target group.

The first contact – what was it like?
Bernd: We were suprised by the open communication and collegial collaboration. XING lives the idea of web 2.0 and there was never a situation like David vs. Goliath.

Your impression of the XING team?
Bernd: They are all very competent and yet open people. ZCOPE was used as project tool for the communication between us and XING. Other companies force you to adapt to the solutions they are already using.

What does Open social mean for you?
Rainer: Seamless communication and information over many different webapplications – information everywhere for everyone.

What do you expect for ZCOPE on XING?
Bernd: We want to make ZCOPE available for a broader audience via XING. In addition it‘s part of our long-term strategy to open ZCOPE for other networks.

What was the biggest challenge while developing?
Rainer: It was a challenge to implement a secure communication between the social container of XING and the Application Server from ZCOPE. Another critical area in our development were performance and security issues in the javascript based os container.

What does the connection between XING and ZCOPE look like?
Bernd: Each XING user may install the application and provide his name and his email address. Then they are ready to manage projects with their XING contacts. Thereby most of the zope features are available for free.

What will the future bring?
Bernd: In the first place we want to gain experience with Open Social therefore we concentrate on the XING platform. As Open Social is an open standard, it‘s quite possible to present our tool in other networks. We focus on platforms that are used by our target group. Quality is more important than high traffic.