Schlumberger Launches Alumni Hub!

By now many of you will have received an invite from Andrew Gould inviting you to the new Schlumberger sponsored Alumni network. He writes:

"Dear Alumni:

I am delighted to invite you to join the new Schlumberger alumni network. Over the years, your contributions have helped us achieve the success we enjoy today. We know that many of you are interested in what's happening in the company and the industry, and we want to stay in touch with you.

That's why we're launching a new Web site for Schlumberger employees, past and present. The Alumni Hub will help you connect with your friends and colleagues all over the world and will bring you news and information that's not readily available elsewhere.

To get started, simply follow the registration instructions shown below. We look forward to hearing from you.

Andrew Gould
Chairman and CEO
Schlumberger Limited"

For those of you who have not received an invite, don't feel slighted, they probably have lost your email address! To join all you need is your name and date of birth, which they will match with their employment records. Registration is here:

https://www.slbalumni.com/jsp/Front/login.jsp

I have had many emails from BrothersReunited members asking whether this was a project of ours, and need to clarify that it is not. While I had been contacted on a few occasions by Slb staff talking about some sort of official Alumni website, the discussions largely centred around whether I could either give them our database (I declined) or code a link to allow Brothers members to seamlessly join the Slb site (I suggested a fee).

In the end Slb has launched this site using commercial software called HoneycombConnect, rather than working with us, resulting in a site that (to my biased eye) attempts to duplicate the functionality of Brothers but with none of the intimacy or comfort that we have tried to incorporate. The devil in me is prompted to ask why the Slb Alumni community is able to build its own solution, while Schlumberger must buy theirs, but to be fair, Slb is not in the software writing business (any more) and they were right to outsource, I am just sad they did not give their dollars to me! The way that we are not even mentioned in the message above nor in any of the text on their site makes us the "elephant in the room" in terms of pretending that the new site fills a gaping need (I suspect the gaping need is rather more on Slb's side than the Alumni's).

Please feel free to join and take a look - I am confident that our software quality, size and attitude will keep you coming back to BrothersReunited!

Forum Board Improvements

It is not a total coincidence that the month I announce that Big Blue is our new competitor, we finally get around to some software improvements. There is nothing like a bit of healthy competition to keep you on your toes! This month we are proud to announce a major upgrade to the Forum boards.

General Improvements

• Forum boards will now reorder dynamically to show the most recently updated at the top.
• We handle threads on a board the same way - no more hunting down a board for threads with new content.
• Half size photos make display more compact.
• When posting new threads, you can now decide on a thread by thread basis whether you would like to be notified (by email) when members reply to your question. You might choose to be notified if posting about a job vacency, but not when posting about the share split for example.
• You can also turn off all Forum notifications (like everything else) from your Account Preferences.

Searching for Text

Type the text you remember seeing or want to find in the search box near the top of this page. You can search All Forums, a single Forum or a long Thread - the navigation bar will turn yellow (to show that you are in search mode) and the threads or posts displayed will be only those that contain your text.

• You can navigate down to a thread and back up to the Board or All Forums view and the search will stay active until you turn it off.
• You can exit search mode by clicking the link "Normal View" below the search box.
• You can also exit by clicking the Forums tab, or by leaving the Forum area.
• You can have different searches active in different browser windows and they wont interfere.
• If there are more than 20 search results, you will have a "Prev" and "Next" link to page through them as usual. (Note: We have switched their names since you are going from the latest to older posts).
• While in search mode, you cannot post replies or start new threads without returning to Normal Mode to avoid confusion.
• You can search again while in search mode if your first try does not turn up what you want.
• Remember that search works from where you are - return to the All Forums display before searching if you want to search everything.

If you would like to check it out, our most active thread at present is on the subject of the new AlumniHub :-)

15000 Members!

Last month we burst through the 15,000 member barrier - and I was notified by Jerry Hammervold that SECU is also close to 15,000 Schlumberger members worldwide:

Software of the Month

We have not had a software of the month column for a while now (not since I got my knuckles rapped for a rather critical piece on the WFDD anyway!) but I am so happy with my latest acquisition that I wanted to share it with you all.

First of all - a confession. I am an email junkie - 80% of my software clients are outside Indonesia, while we now have a dozen online communities to support with over 60,000 members who all need looking after. I have traditionally kept an eye on my Inbox on my Nokia handphone (that is Cell to you Americans and Mobile to those at home in UK) while away from my desk (Blackberry type push solutions are not really an option here due to excessive GPRS bandwidth charges).

The Nokia email support was clumsy and slow at best - after 3 years of struggling with it on my trusty old Nokia 7650 (the original smartphone) I finally treated myself to one of the latest Series 60 phones, the 6681, expecting radically improved software support. You can imagine my disappointment then to find that while the screen is dazzling, the polyphonic ring tones amazing and the 1.3 Megapixel camera has flash (sort of) the basic software is not only unimproved, but in some departments degraded!

Enter Profimail from Lonely Cat Games. An email client for my handphone, that maximises it's use of the limited screen space, mimimises it's use of those expensive GPRS bytes and works so intuitively that I am completely bowled over. Some of the features:

• Supports POP and IMAP mail servers. On IMAP you can move emails from folder to folder (as well as create new folders) on the server, from your handphone!
• Downloads just the headers, headers + say 2K or full messages.
• In IMAP mode you can get the email without attachments and then pull the attachments as required.
• Supports multiple mail boxes of different types.
• Supports mail rules including auto delete of flagged spam etc.
• Always shows you what it is doing and how much traffic you have used so far.
• Has single key shortcuts for most common actions - Green (call) button to check your mail, c to delete, numbers for reply, forward, details ect.

Screen Shots
     

Price is $25 for Nokia or $24 for PocketPC phones. If you have ever thought of using your phone to check your email, I can't recommend this package highly enough!

Rgds
Ewan Makepeace
info@brothersreunited.com
http://www.brothersreunited.com