A few SIDEARM FAQs and Tips

Hello all, first blog post from the corporate office and I must say it's actually better than I expected. Working closely with the designers, research and development team, programmers and project managers has been great.

Over the last few weeks, our project managers and the rest of the customer support team have seen a common group of requests of both new and veteran clients not fully understanding that even some of the simpler tasks in SIDEARM are under their control. Therefore we will try to address some of these, as well as provide some additional tips and tricks you can try within your site.

FAQs
You are adding a new schedule or roster and you don't see a 2009-10 or 2010 season listed

1. You can add seasons into the software on your own if you go to Site Settings and Seasons

2. Hit the plus sign next to seasons and you will see Add Season and click this link

3. You will enter a season for example 2009-10 for the Long Title and Shortname and for the start date of multi-year seasons would be 7/1/2009 in this example and a season such as 2010 would have a start date of 1/1/2010.

Your marketing director comes into your office and says I would add Promotions under Athletic Department links or a coach says I want to add a link for camps to their baseball index.

[For Main Navigation (traditionally located on sites as left or horizontal navigation)]
1. To place a link under your main navigation, go to the backend of your website and then go to Navigation

2. Then Main Navigation in top menu Choose a Section

3. Select a top navigation section such as "Athletics" and hit search

4. Click the "Add New" button at the bottom

5. Insert a Link Title (i.e. Marketing, Sports Medicine, Camps, Clinics, etc.)

6. Then you choose where to have it linked to (i.e. Build Link to an area within
managed components of the site, link to a sport file or link to a document)

7. Select parent as Top-Level or choose a different section if you want it to appear as a sub-navigation under that section

8. Save changes and it will appear

9. You can change rank order if you like of the items you place in here as well by clicking the drag and drop tab.

You can also add direct links from the navigation items on the left or top by clicking on Manage Navigation Sections then you will see a list of the items and edit one and you will see an area to link to an outside URL, build a link, link to a sport file or document, etc.

[For Sports Index Navigation (traditionally right navigation)]
1. To place a link into the sidebar navigation of a sport home page go to the backend of your website and then go to Navigation

2. Then Category Sidebars in top menu Choose a Sport

3. Select a sport home page such as "Baseball" and hit search

4. Click the "Add New" button at the bottom

5. Insert a Link Title (i.e. Roster, Coaches, Stats, etc.)

6. Then choose where to have it linked to (i.e. Build Link to an area within managed components of the site, link to a sport file or link to a document)

7. Save changes and it will appear

8. You can change rank order if you like of the items you place in here as well by clicking the drag and drop tab.

Creating a URL Redirect (making a more user-friendly link to promote an event)
1. To find this section you must go to Navigation and hit the plus sign to expand and see URL Redirects.

2. Next hit the plus sign on URL redirects to see Add Redirect

3. This will display several fields to fill in, the first is Text which is what you want the part after http://www.sidearmsports.com/ - for example joss, then the URL would be http://www.sidearmsports.com/joss

4. The second field URL would be if you wanted the redirect to go to an offsite URL (say something that isn't very user-friendly such as this directions example to the ICS Corporate Headquarters:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Smith+Drive,+Syracuse,+NY&sll=43.038674,-76.132751&sspn=0.001055,0.001843&ie=UTF8&ll=43.039568,-76.132936&spn=0.008437,0.014741&z=16&iwloc=A&iwstate1=actions

5. You can also build a link to an area within the site and the other selection options are if you wanted to link to a sport file or a document you have added to your SIDEARM site.

Tips

Adding your conference logo to your schedules
1. You can add logos to your conference games by expanding Site Settings and you will see Conferences

2. Click on Conference and you will see Choose a Conference in the top right frame. Select the conference you want to add a logo to in the pull down menu and click edit conference button

3. You will see a logo section and choose image link. This will open the images component and you can either add a logo as a new image or search for it, if you have already loaded this into the images component. You will just select the appropriate resize to appear on the schedule. If a resize isn't available that you like, you can always upload a specifically sized image as a new version of your conference logo.

4. Once you select the image, you must ensure that you remove the "*" that was designating conference games, as this will take precedence over an image chosen.

Adding Headshots on Roster Pages
There is now a way for the image of a player to show up on the roster page as in the example (http://www.suathletics.com/roster.aspx?path=Football).

1. To add an image column to an existing roster, you need to edit the Fields tab of a roster.

2. If you wanted it to be the second column after the jersey number you have to first move the current fields down a column to be able to insert. For instance, if name was originally in the second column then the Name would be moved to the third column and subsequent fields would need to be adjusted downward.

3. Then find the field entitled "Image" and place it into the second column.

4. After you have completed these steps, your roster should now look like the Syracuse website.

Password Protecting Pages
SIDEARM now has the ability to restrict access to specific groups for sport files.

(Setting up the Group)
1. Go to Protected Access and expand the category with the plus sign to the left of the title

2. Then expand the Groups link with the plus sign and click Add New Group. Give the group a title and description if you like and you have the option to set an expiration date for this group.

3. Once a group is setup adding users to groups, this is done at the link above Users and expand the link with the plus sign and click Add New User. This can be individuals or you can use a universal UN/PW for all athletes for example and you select the groups this UN/PW have access to.

(Restricting Access to a Sport File)
1. Add a new sport file and in doing so on the details page you will see a selection area at the bottom to restrict access to the group you setup earlier.

Adding Google Directions to your Facility Listings on Your Schedules

(Add a Sport File for Directions to Facility)
1. Add new Sport File and give it a title example, ICS Dome.

2. In the Text Area click the source button on the editor toolbar in the top left corner and paste the embed code from Google Maps.
(Getting the embed code from Google)
a. Visit http://maps.google.com and type in your facility location or an address as close as possible to the facility.
b. After the location is mapped click on the Link button in the top right corner of the google site. Copy embed code and paste as instructed in step 2.

3. Don't select a primary image

4. Associate it with which sports you want or general category

5. Click finish and save.

(Linking Sport File to Facilities Page)
1. Expand Site Settings and click on Facilities. You should see a pulldown menu on the top right window of SIDEARM and you can select a facility and edit it.

2. Click link to the sport file and browse for the file you created in the previous steps. Now when people see the facility listed on your schedules, they can click for directions.

There are certainly more FAQs and tips that our Customer Support team will offer in the coming months. Our plan is to run these at least once a week and they will be available to review when you have time. At least now there are less games to worry about and it's more of a relaxing time of the year so you can mess around with your SIDEARM site a bit more.

Let us know if you have any specific areas you would like to be addressed. Please send your questions to us at training@support.internetconsult.com

Great Mobile Sites

If you are like me, addicted to your (insert mobile device name here..iPhone/Blackberry/etc), you can't live without mobile sites. I'm talking about websites that give you all the info of the full featured site, but don't contain all of the graphics or flashy animations. They let you "gas and go"....go to the site, get your info, and leave..... Here are a few that I use everyday:

HopStop (http://hopstop.com/pda)
If you live in an area with public transportation (or frequent one like me), the subway/train/bus schedule is not the simplest to memorize. Go to this site on your device, enter a start point and end point and it will give you door to door directions how to get there, either by walking or taking public transportation.

CNBC Mobile (http://mobile.cnbc.com)
For no apparent reason, I like to watch the stock market during the day. When at my computer I stick to Google Finance, but they still haven't developed a mobile version of their site. Yes, the iPhone does have a stocks app, but it's typically delayed 20minutes in reporting. When on the go, CNBC's site is great, it's simple and effective.


ESPN (http://m.espn.com)
ESPN has done a great job with their mobile site. Unlike their desktop site, the mobile site does not contain any of the high quality graphics, so it's quick to load on any mobile device. This site has all of the same stories, but are just formatted differently.

So there you go, three mobile sites that I use regularly... what mobile sites do you use?

Let the Conference Season and Games Begin!

Meet Jon Kasper from the Big Sky Conference. This photo was taken shortly after he won the 2008 "SIDEBALL" championship at our CoSIDA booth last summer. You may be thinking to yourself "What is SIDEBALL?" Well I'll tell you. SIDEBALL is a bocci-like game that we invented, and it's as simple to learn as it is difficult to master. Every year at our annual summer conferences we're presented with a brand-new tradeshow environment in which to invent a game. Using our free promotional gifts (usually the ones that bounce, roll or fly), we challenge ourselves to invent a fun new game for everyone to play. While visiting us at our booth this year and learning about all the new services that ICS offers, be sure to take in a round of this year's conference competition... and maybe YOU can be holding the trophy in next year's picture!

LEFT: ICS President Jeff Rubin lines up a killer SIDEBALL shot off the leg of an unsuspecting credenza

Gearing up for Summer

As Syracuse shifts from its gray winters to its less gray spring and summer, we here at ICS are gearing up for the busy summer season. This will be my first summer here at ICS, since I started last September. I've been told that the summers will make me cry and tear what is left of my hair out.

As a support programmer here, hopefully I can help make your summer website requests an easy transaction into your fall sports.

Feel free to share your summer work stories!

Jamie's in the 'Cuse

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to be the first to officially announce... The one, the only, Jamie Joss is officially a resident of the Syracuse area.

He's adapting well so far, and last night after almost everyone had gone home.. it happened.... the first ever Slapball match for Mr. Joss.

It's still too early in his career for an official scouting report, but for your viewing pleasure, I did manage to capture a few photos to commemorate the occasion.

Join me in welcoming Jamie to the corporate HQ!

ck

And the Winner is......

Congratulations to Jesse Robinson from the College of St. Scholastica who is the winner of a new iPod Nano.    Jesse was entry number 116 which was the random number that was picked as the winner.   Jesse now has 30 seconds to respond to this post letting us know what color iPod he wants.   If he fails to respond the iPod will go to me (o.k. - kidding about that part).

I truly want to thank all 127 people who particpated in our first of many customer satisfaction surveys.   We are having many team meetings to discuss all the wonderful feedback we received.   We are thrilled  to say that the majority of entries had strongly agree as the top selection for every question.   

We will respond to all feature requests, questions, issues, or other items raised in the comments area of the survey.

I hope the end of the academic year is going well for everyone and I look forward to seeing you all at the workshops this summer!

Thanks again,

Jeff

The view from the highways of America

So sorry for the lack of updates, since iPhones don't have cut/copy/
paste functionality yet and driving until our bodies shutdown each day
has drained us...so the trip has been the longest of our lives but we
stay focused by the eyes on the prize of being closer to family and
friends and being more of the ICS team in the corporate office...we
have had countless unaccounted stops for feedings of our two month
old, diaper changes, drinks and snacks, bathroom visits, sanity stops
of being in a moving truck that gets a static connection to NPR and a
lighter outlet that doesn't work to charge your phone or power the
Magellan...so the first day it took 12 hours with all stops, 55MPH cap
because of the trailers in tow, traffic and random issues to travel
what normally takes 7 hours (somych for planning) to charlotte arrival
at 4:15 am I believe...day 2 more of the same 12 hour drive to
Harrisburg which normally takes 7...along this journey, I have met
some of the wonderful truckers on the road. I guess when you visit
the diesel pumps you become a card carrying member. At this stop I
met Billy, I actually asked to take his picture but he refused said
something about the witness protection agency. I think he was a brain
surgeon before and to authenticate his new job as a redneck truck
driver with so much snuff in his mouth he looked like a chipmunk
storing nuts for the winter, he self administered the removal of 3/4
of his brain. So as we waited for Merlisa (yes merlisa! Think the
moms accent was misunderstood by the birth certificate recorder) Billy
struck up a conversation which I will summarize: he talked to me for
15 minutes (yes Merlisa wasn't the sharpest on the register ask me to
tell you the $50 diesel story when you see me next.)

So Billy said words all that time and I knodded and offered the casual
pleasantries, but honestly couldn't understand one word...needless to
say I am glad we have such people on the roads with me.

Ok will write a final recap tonight or this weekend...