We all hear the same thing; our community is getting smaller and smaller.
If you are a Tandem Professional then you know how difficult it can be to find a place to hang out with others of your talents, ask how others have tackled different situations, get samples of known working code (TACL, ENFORM, PTAL, SQLCI or whatever) and have the folks that wrote it and use it available to ask questions and bounce ideas off.
You know the frustration of getting tons of useless phone calls from recruiters looking for a systems admin or programmer, just to find out that they are looking for Unix or Windows people and just saw Admin / Programmer in your resume and 'figured they'd just call'. Here the recruiters that browse through our resumes will be looking for our talents not just whatever.
You know that there are people out there like you, a Tandem Pro, but you only see them at ITUG (if you get to go) and would really like a place to meet them. Here as more and more of us come onboard you can contact them via a built in Private Messenger feature or use our online Chatbox feature or check out who is posting to the various Forums.
You know that HP just announced something new about Tandem but don't what to browse around the HP website to find out what. Use our Newsfeed feature to pull up the newest news from HP and other relevant HP vendors. The list will grow as I find more and more news feeds.
As a Pro member you can get access to the above and much more. This site is currently taking advantage of Google Apps to provide our Pro members with a TANDEMPROS.COM email address, a group calendar, someplace to store and share documents and your own website.
This is limited to only 100 users.
(So if you don't want this additional benifit, PLEASE let us know so we can give it to another PRO member.)
Email: Now when Pros send out an email to a recruiter or anyone else for that matter they will know who you are, and what you do. If you are a Tandem Professional and are using an email address from MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo and even Gmail your email may not even reach them. A lot of ISPs are blocking emails from these domains without the recipients knowledge or approval. Furthermore, using email addresses like the above do not show the world you are a talented professional, professionals have REAL email addresses. This is not my opinion it's just the way it is.
Documents: Store your personally written code (TACLs, ENFORMs and the like) away from your current jobs computer. Share them with others, snag others TACLs and try them out, keep a copy of your resume. Keep all of it online and accessable from anywhere in the world you are.
Calendar: Post upcoming events or check when events are coming up. Standard calendar features but all online.
Sites: With Google's addition of Google Sites we can now create websites that are hosted by Google but tied to TandemPros.com. Cool huh. Check the forums for more info.
This system is capable of much more so keep watching and make suggestions. I will always take suggestions.