Key-Soft Old Birthday

When Sibers was small, it was called Key-Soft. Now, every October we gather all together: people who worked in Key-Soft and still work in Sibers, people who worked in Key-Soft, and people who are working in Sibers and never worked in Key-Soft. Namely: everyone.
Last Friday we did it again, and everyone said that was the warmest party ever.
We also introduced the Sibers Alumni program to keep in touch with those who changed their place of work but remain our good friends.

In the picture: Director of Development Alexey Shpack launches the Holy Cow in front of the cheering and a bit drunk co-workers holding an old banner of Key-Soft, which was hard to find this year. Click to view the full picture.

Sibers Takes on Wild West Adventures

Sibers’ 11th anniversary was held on July 4, which is quite a remarkable date for us with our clients being mainly from the USA; moreover, it happened to be Saturday; and what is even more important, it happened to be the first really hot summer day in Siberia!

We chose to have a thematic celebration devoted to the Wild West and all the American attributes resembling the idea of American and European fancy dress festivals devoted to different historical events. The festival included team building, which turns out a very funny thing for a big company like ours. In order to grab the main prize teams had to go through quite a number of challenges, both intellectual and requiring active participation. Every step in this quest brought the team additional units turned money during the auction, when the teams purchased certain items for making a raft. The raft had to be floatable in order to bring a team representative to the prize floating about 50m off the shore of our lovely artificial sea. Needless to say, the game appeared real funny and caused a lot of improvisation, creativity and team work, which is a feature of Sibers.

The party following the game continued the topic of American celebrations with whisky, tequila, boiled corn, grilled meat, etc. Music and merry contests enlivened the celebration, which continued for about 12 hours in a row.

Thanks to the wonderful weather and enthusiastic colleagues, we are now more than happy to resume our work for years and years to follow.

First submissions to Google Earth

Our first 3D buildings of Akademgorodok start to appear in Google Earth. Turn on the 3D Buildings layer and point to Novosibirsk Akademgorodok to see some of institutes (including ours), the House of Scientists and School 130, which many of Sibersers graduated from.

Much more to follow, including Novosibirsk State University, the Shopping Center, and all of the residential buildings.o

New Office in Downtown

We are pleased to announce opening of our first office in Novosibirsk city. Located in downtown, the new office is able to accommodate about 30 Sibersers who live in the city. Close connections to main bus, tram, trolley and subway lines make it possible to avoid traffic jams.

New Year 2008 Party

Yesterday we all celebrated New Year and although my head still feels sick, I must tell you about one of our best parties ever.
Since it’s too boring to just drink to the new year, our idea was to launch a spaceship to 2008 because in the space it was already 2008. Alexey Shpak, Director of Development, counted down to zero and we took off. Space rock-n-roll (kudos to Artem Grinevich and Evgeniy Odnoval), fireworks and final crashing of CRT monitors were the highlights of that night!

Happy Birthday, KG-United!

One year ago today, on October 29, Sibers founded its Bishkek sister – KG-United. Having started with just several PHP programmers in a small one-room office, which was formerly a library, now KG-United unites more than 30 PHP, .Net, Flash programmers, designers, project managers and salesmen in a large and modern office. We congratulate KG-United with a good start and wish them many clients, prompt payments and a lot of positive in their lives!

Pilaf Party

This weekend we ate pilaf. We did it right – with hands, like they do it in Asia. A proper cauldron, whole bulbs of garlic, lamb and sunny weather made this pilaf a perfect one. Most desperate ones ate portion after portion and then continued playing volleyball as if nothing happened. The party finished only after dawn when last couples of bikers left the pilaf meadow…

Leadership Training

Last Friday and Saturday our managers and team leaders were learning to be better managers and leaders. The training was aimed at developing leadership skills, motivation techniques and problem solving. We learned main principles of situational management and how to make everyone in the team work at their best. After resolving many real situations, we agreed that we’re gonna need another training for motivation and time management.

Team leaders and Andrey, our trainer.

Andrey, Anya and Alex Shpak

Tim is trying to motivate Alex not to go to Japan

Andrey is about to apply some techniques to his team :)

Sharepoint Portal Services 3 for New Portal

We have migrated to a new version, Sharepoint Portal Services 3. As a result:

• Our Portal has a new address with a https certificate;
• Now it has a mobile version for those working with modems and GPRS;
• It works much better with Firefox 2.0, which is handy for our Linux team;
• Portal has a RSS subscription, although it doesn’t work with all the Feedreaders;
• Posts for the Portal can be typed in Office 2007 (through Blog API), and messages can be edited remotely;
• Each message has a place for the avatar, which can add some implicit information about the author;
• Discussions accompanying some news and interesting information have much better usability;
• Portal is Wiki-compatible.
• Outlook is connected with SPS, and we can enjoy the search and other offline advantages.

As for the subscriptions, RSS might well be better.

Sibers anniversary

October 7, 2006, the Rest House “Energetic” in a recreational area of Novosibirsk. Corporate celebration of 2 company’s historical dates – 8th Anniversary and rebranding. The celebration crowned the long preliminary process of developing a new style and a new brand as well as organizing the event itself.

The “D-day” began at 12 p.m. with the corporate game “The Lord of the Rings” designed to close our ranks and form the team spirit.

Almost 100 players (employees together with spouses) were divided into 5 “kingdoms” – of fire, water, air, ground, rings – and offered the inhabitants of other kingdoms some team contests awarding the best performers with the rings.

All the contests had attributes of corresponding kingdoms, and the players struggled with each of the “elements” demonstrating creativity, support and great will to win.

By the end of the game all the teams were almost equal in the number of the rings gained and triumphantly linked their rings into a solid chain, the symbol of unity. The corporate souvenirs to mark the friendly atmosphere and perfect feeling of comradeship were stylish mugs with the new brand name, Sibers, presented to the employees.

After the game a bit tired but happy players were offered barbeque (shashlik) with all the necessary attributes. Then all comers could choose how to spend their free time – either riding horses, or playing the billiards or table tennis, or visiting sauna.

After a few hours of active rest, all the participants proceeded to the banquet room, where they could enjoy an informal official presentation and delicious food.

The presentation began with an opening word of our CEO, Serge Markov, followed by a “historical film”, which showed the birth, formation and development of the company in a serious way spiced up with a great sense of humor. The film’s director, producer and creator, also known as the company’s founder, Yury Bannov, was welcomed by enthusiastic, long lasted applause. Our new employees could find out a lot of interesting information about our glorious history and links with such giant partners as IWC and 3COM. The banquet went on, alternating with jokes and dances, and climaxed with the presentation of a gorgeous cake with the corporate logo.

Thus we have become even more energetic, enthusiastic and united as a team linked by the common rings.