Game Linking

Well the feature that hundreds have asked for is finally here... Game Linking! We're excited to announce this past week that our game linking feature is now available to all our schedulers to make scheduling faster and easier than ever before. This is really geared towards youth and high school organizations that allow their officials to work multiple games in a day. Unfortunately, there will be minimal use for organizations that allow officials to only work 1 game per day, however, there is the possibility.

Here's how it works:

Let's say you want to schedule an afternoon of games and you are going to send the same officials to a set of 3 games. Previously, it was possible to schedule the first two then get to the third and realize that one of the officials was no longer available. Now if you link those three games, you will get 1 scheduling window that will tell you who is available for ALL the games. Create your assignments once, and all 3 games are populated with those officials.

Although it seems intimidating, it's actually quite easy.

1. Turn ON Game Linking

2. Select games to link

3. Press Link Button.

4. Schedule like normal, except with less work.

We're more than happy to walk our schedulers through using the system, so if you think you're interested, but afraid to try it out - give us a call! We'll help you through scheduling your first set of linked games! Enjoy!

TIM

HorizonWebRef.com

Felony Impersonation & New Stuff

Well wasn't this an exciting week! If we take a moment to reflect on what we've learned this last week, the first thing we would certainly put on the list is that running onto a football field dressed as a referee, promptly followed by some streaking will get you felony charges! Felony?! Yup, that's right kids, 23 year old Jace Lankow was arrested following his highly publicized stunt this week. In case any of you missed it, here's a few videos to recap the scenario:








Now aside from the annoying voice in the second video, one thing we can say for sure is that you'd want to keep this sort of behavior under wraps, especially since it quickly resulted in a brawl between players with both sidelines clearing. Right away, you might think, "Alright, he's going to get charged for trespassing." Believe it or not, though, felony charges were brought up against this young man for felony impersonation. Whew! Now I'm no lawyer, but even though I don't condone this sort of thing, I think felony impersonation seems a bit extreme. In any case, the first part was certainly a good chuckle and we'll have to see how this pans out.

In other news, we saw a few changes to the HorizonWebRef.com system this week that were nothing incredibly life altering, but certainly helpful (we think), nonetheless. First up, was the addition of the new group sharing feature. Contact groups were previously available to all individuals, but now administrators and schedulers can create contact groups and then share them with other people. This is a great way to help make master lists for your entire organization. Next up, we added the ability to put a time frame on WHEN coaches/ADs could see their officials. We've been asked many times to incorporate this so now you can allow them to see their officials, but restrict it to a certain timeframe, like say, Game Day Only, or 1 Day Before the Game or 3 Days Before the Game, etc, etc. Finally, we updated the mobile version of the site with larger fonts, a more optimized view and bigger icons/buttons for easier touching on touchscreens. Now initially, we did catch a little flak from some users about the new mobile version so we tweaked it a little more since the initial change. We've added the Game Type & Teams back to the schedule view which were initially removed. We appreciate the feedback and are certainly open to other optimization if people still feel we're missing something. Hopefully everyone enjoys the easier to use version.

Anyways, that's all for this edition. We've got some exciting new features coming up soon, so stayed tuned!

TIM

Technical Support

HorizonWebRef.com

Hello World. Blog Initialized.

Well we decided that it was time we create a blog for ourselves so that we could share with the world all our inner most and deep-dark secrets. That's what you've all been waiting for, right? Well, maybe not so much. Quite frankly, internet marketing experts will tell you that having a blog is a key piece to any internet marketing campaign and having said blog will increase your website's performance in search engine rankings. We've known this for quite some time, but we really couldn't come up with any ideas for something that would be interesting or worthwhile for our clients to read. In any case, we've decided to create one anyways and just spew out anything of interest that we just had to say. Hopefully, it will be interesting to some and at the same time will satisfy the marketing people's demands for a blog too. As such, blog posting #1 is really just a rant on what we plan on doing with this blog and what you can expect from it.

Now, if what you're expecting is paramount revelations that will solve all the world's problems then you've come to the wrong place. We don't have all the answers. What we will post about, though, is primarily anything of interest that we're looking into or trying to create for the HorizonWebRef.com system. Additionally, we anticipate that we might post about some local things in our area or about our officials on staff so that our clients and community can see what our referees are doing or how they use the HorizonWebRef.com system. From time to time, we may throw out some of our own internet marketing or success tips if we feel people might benefit from them. Maybe even a congratulatory remark or two about our friends.

Nevertheless, we're going to try to keep this interesting for everyone involved. Hopefully, someone might find some worth to it. If not, maybe we'll hire a comedian, inspiring figure, or just someone who drinks a lot to write our blogs for us. Who knows, maybe we'll do that anyways.

Anyways, thanks for a least entertaining the first post. We'll see what we can put up for you in the coming weeks.

TIM

HorizonWebRef.com

HorizonWebRef.com is the premier online assigning, scheduling, and management software system for sports officials, referees, and umpires! Check us out today at www.HorizonWebRef.com